Search engine giant Google claimed on Monday hackers from the Russian government are exploiting complex flaws that are closely related to those used by notorious spyware producers, Intellexa and NSO Group.

Russia’s APT29 has been observed using exploits that are either identical or strikingly similar to those used by NSO Group and Intellexa, according to researchers in the Google TAG (Threat Analysis Group).

This unholy move by the Russian government suggests that state-backed actors and contentious surveillance software vendors may be purchasing tools from each other.

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Google researchers claim that APT29 has employed a number of in-the-wild exploit activities that stemmed from an attack on government websites in Mongolia via a watering hole.

The campaigns employed a Chrome exploit chain against Android users running versions from m121 to m123 after first delivering an iOS WebKit exploit that affected iOS versions older than 16.6.1.

Google TAG said: “These campaigns delivered n-day exploits for which patches were available, but would still be effective against unpatched devices,” adding that the attackers used exploits that were strikingly similar to, or identical to, those previously used by NSO Group and Intellexa in each iteration of the watering hole campaigns.

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