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APT28 is a Russian state-sponsored cyberespionage group attributed to Unit 26165 of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU. Widely known as Fancy Bear, it is also tracked as Sofacy, Sednit, Pawn Storm, STRONTIUM, Forest Blizzard, Fighting Ursa, FROZENLAKE, BlueDelta, and UAC-0001. Its operations collect strategic intelligence from governments, diplomatic institutions, military organizations, defense contractors, political organizations, and international sporting and anti-doping bodies. Targets include Ukrainian government and defense entities, the US Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and organizations involved in chemical-weapons and aviation investigations. APT28 obtains initial access through spearphishing links and attachments, credential-harvesting websites, exploitation of software vulnerabilities, brute-force authentication, and abuse of valid or default credentials. It has targeted internet-connected devices as entry points into corporate networks and conducted large-scale vulnerability scanning. Its phishing operations use impersonation, shortened links, malicious Office documents, and archive attachments. The group’s DealersChoice platform delivered Adobe Flash exploits through weaponized documents, and APT28 has also exploited the WinRAR vulnerability CVE-2023-38831. Post-compromise activity includes credential dumping with Mimikatz and custom tools, extraction of LSASS memory, continued access through compromised accounts, lateral spread, and data exfiltration. Its tooling includes Zebrocy and the LoJax UEFI rootkit, which can preserve persistence despite hard-drive replacement. Other observed techniques include Startup-folder persistence, Office-based persistence, payload encoding and runtime decoding, virtualization checks, and routing authentication attempts through Tor and commercial VPN services. APT28 conducts both remote intrusions and close-access operations, including compromises associated with shared wireless networks.
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Who, where, and (when attributed) which flag flies behind the operation. Pulled from open-source reporting and Mallory's analyst review.
Sectors the actor has been observed targeting.
Geographies tied to known operations.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
79 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
54 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
49 additional families tracked in Mallory.
37 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 37 of them exploited in the wild.
Recently Exploited Vulnerabilities by Fancy Bear: CVE-2023-23397, CVE-2023-38831, CVE-2023-20085.
In January, Russia’s APT28 launched “Operation Neusploit,” exploiting a Microsoft Office zero-day (CVE-2026-21509) within days of discovery to target Ukrainian defense institutions and allied governments.
On June 20, 2022, Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence identified a document weaponized with the Follina (CVE-2022-30190) exploit to download and execute a .NET credential stealer. The article reports this as its first observation of APT28 using Follina.
A critical vulnerability in Synacor Zimbra Collaboration Suite, tracked as CVE-2025-66376, has been exploited by Russian state-sponsored threat actors in targeted attacks against Western governments and Ukraine. The flaw is a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Zimbra's Classic UI, where a malicious HTML email abuses CSS @import directives to execute arbitrary JavaScript when opened in a vulnerable webmail session.
The Water Hydra group exploited the aforementioned CVE-2023-38831 as a zero-day to target cryptocurrency traders in April 2023 — months before disclosure.
32 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
1,758 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
The report title associates APT28 with Covenant Grunt concealed in Office documents. The supplied excerpt provides no further operational or targeting details.
Referenced as the Russian-linked group associated with LoJax, illustrating firmware-level persistence that survives hard-drive replacement.
Mentioned only alongside Sandworm as an example of distinguishing Russian threat actors and access handoffs. No involvement in the reported North Korean campaign is alleged.
Mentioned in an infrastructure-investigation example illustrating VirusTotal's new scanning capabilities. Researchers used fingerprints and service characteristics to discover additional hosts, but the article explicitly cautions that historical associations do not establish current APT28 ownership or attribution. No specific operation is attributed to APT28.
Match sector + geo + tech-stack targeting against your real footprint.
Every observed MITRE ATT&CK technique, grouped by tactic.
Families this actor is known to deploy, with IOCs and behavior.
CVEs this actor has used in known campaigns.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Domains, IPs, and hashes tied to this actor, refreshed continuously.