Researchers say the group planted malicious code on legitimate sites and a Ukrainian analytics service, then used known vulnerabilities to pull data from vulnerable phones.
Sekoia attributes a large-scale watering hole operation to APT29 with moderate-to-high confidence. The payloads chained already-patched browser and OS flaws, and none of them established persistence.
The settlement, pending bankruptcy court approval, resolves allegations the company failed to protect customer data before a breach that exposed information on nearly 7 million people.
Google promoted Chrome 156 to the stable channel with patches for 353 vulnerabilities, including six rated critical, and said none were known to be exploited in the wild.
Mozilla and Google's Chrome Root Program confirmed the compromise of private keys for eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates, a failure that could let a key holder mint trusted certificates for any site.