Russian hackers exploited vulnerabilities in Safari and Chrome to launch cyberattacks from November 2023 to July 2024. They used a watering hole attack on Mongolian government websites to infect mobile users with malware, stealing information.

The recent campaigns targeting various sectors, including the energy and government sectors, highlight the effectiveness of known vulnerabilities even with available patches, emphasizing the importance of proactive software security measures.

A new campaign has been discovered with similarities to a previous campaign, including the use of social media sites to build rapport with targets. The threat actors then engage in encrypted messaging and send a malicious file with a 0-day exploit.

In this blog, researchers have shared details about two distinct campaigns that used various 0-day exploits against Android, iOS, and Chrome and were both limited and highly targeted.

Consistent with findings from CitizenLab, Google TAG assesses that government-backed actors purchasing these exploits are located (at least) in Egypt, Armenia, Greece, Madagascar, Côte d’Ivoire, Serbia, Spain, and Indonesia.

Advanced Protection safeguards the personal or business Google Accounts of anyone at risk of targeted attacks—like political campaign teams, journalists, activists and business leaders.