APT29's Watering Holes Target Thousands of Mobile Users
C darkreading ·
Admiralty grading (A–F · 1–6)
Source reliability
- A Completely reliable
- B Usually reliable
- C Fairly reliable
- D Not usually reliable
- E Unreliable
- F Cannot be judged
Information credibility
- 1 Confirmed
- 2 Probably true
- 3 Possibly true
- 4 Doubtful
- 5 Improbable
- 6 Cannot be judged
NATO Admiralty (AJP-2.1) grades confidence, independent of the risk score. Cross-source corroboration isn't tracked for non-CVE news, so single-source items are capped at a lower credibility number; a low number does not imply low quality.
Key insight
APT29 uses compromised websites as watering holes to fingerprint mobile visitors and selectively harvest data , an active state-sponsored espionage campaign that goes beyond patch management.
Description
The Russian state-sponsored group APT29 (Cozy Bear) compromises websites and uses them as watering holes to attack mobile users. Visitors are first fingerprinted; only selected victims deemed interesting are targeted further and have information harvested from them. The campaign is reported to affect thousands of mobile users and is active. It is a state-controlled espionage operation with no link to a single CVE; the attack surface is compromised websites and the mobile devices accessing them.
Risk score
- strategic relevance
- 0.90
Path: strategic