FireEye Labs recently detected a limited APT campaign exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and a brand-new one in Microsoft Windows. Using the Dynamic Threat Intelligence Cloud (DTI), FireEye researchers detected a pattern of attacks beginning on April 13th, 2015. Adobe independently patched the vulnerability (CVE-2015-3043) in APSB15-06. Through correlation of technical indicators and command and control infrastructure, FireEye assess that a group called APT28 is probably responsible for this activity.

Microsoft is aware of the outstanding local privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows (CVE-2015-1701). While there is not yet a patch available for the Windows vulnerability, updating Adobe Flash to the latest version will render this in-the-wild exploit innocuous. Researchers have only seen CVE-2015-1701 in use in conjunction with the Adobe Flash exploit for CVE-2015-3043. The Microsoft Security Team is working on a fix for CVE-2015-1701.

The security researchers at FireEye have determined that APT28, a politically-motivated Russian hacking group, was responsible for the cyber-spying campaign.

The campaign has been tied by other firms to a serious breach at U.S. State Department computers. The same hackers are also believed to have broken into White House machines containing unclassified but sensitive information such as the president’s travel schedule.

FireEye has been assisting the agencies probing those attacks, but it said it could not comment on whether the spies are the same ones who penetrated the White House because that would be classified as secret.