Year-long Russian attacks infect users as soon as they look at an email

Summary

PATCHES Year-long Russian attacks infect users as soon as they look at an email Phishing for dummies Kremlin cyber goons have been breaking into government and commercial networks for at least a year by exploiting a Zimbra bug with a novel twist on Russia’s usual phishing expeditions: this attack occurs as soon as the victim looks at an email, with no need to even click on a link or open a file.These attacks have been ongoing since July 2025, according to a whopping 27 US, UK, and other international government agencies, which attribute the intrusions to a group they track as Laundry Bear, aka Void Blizzard.“Laundry Bear’s targeting is almost certainly to gather sensitive information for the Russian Federation, with these actors primarily focusing on the covert acquisition of email data,” according to the joint security alert. The Russians’ latest campaign targets CVE-2025-66376, a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Zimbra web-based email and collaboration suite that was patched in November 2025 – but Moscow's attackers began exploiting it long before then. This type of vulnerability allows attackers to inject malicious JavaScript into web pages viewed by the victim. In this case, the phishing bears abused the security hole in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite by sending malware-laden HTML email messages to target Western organizations. Targeted orgs include those in the defense industrial base, federal and local governments, education, energy, law enforcement, media, non-governmental organizations, and technology sectors.Some of the email addresses used in this campaign include ivanka.zurabishvili@proton[.]me, zmul1@buildandconsulting[.]com, garrysmithme@pinmx[.]net, and hostingclient@pinmx[.]net, we’re told.The attack doesn’t require any user interaction other than viewing the malicious email, and once that happens, the attackers get to work exfiltrating a ton of data. This includes the victims’ last 90 days of email communications, email addresses and p...