APT29 (Cozy Bear) remains one of the most active cyber espionage groups linked to the Russian intelligence apparatus. Their approach is not built around “fast” attacks, but around long-term access, credential operations, and gradual persistence inside targeted infrastructure.

The report breaks down a typical APT29 attack chain — from OSINT collection, phishing delivery, and malicious RDP/HTML files to Azure AD compromise, persistence through service principals, and further activity within Office 365 and cloud environments. It also examines techniques repeatedly observed in recent campaigns, including DLL sideloading, HTML smuggling, OAuth token theft, MFA fatigue, and domain fronting.

The material also includes: — malware families and their functionality — infrastructure patterns and indicators of compromise — behavioral indicators for detection and threat hunting — approaches to identifying activity in Active Directory, endpoint infrastructure, and Azure AD — mitigation recommendations for cloud-first organizations

Particular attention is given to the fact that many modern attacks are no longer centered around malware itself, but around digital identities, cloud access, and trust relationships between services. In many cases, weak MFA policies, legacy authentication mechanisms, and insufficient cloud activity monitoring become the actual entry point for compromise.