A menace actor presumably of Russian origin has been attributed to a brand new set of assaults concentrating on the vitality sector in Kazakhstan.
The exercise, codenamed Operation BarrelFire, is tied to a brand new menace group tracked by Seqrite Labs as Noisy Bear. The menace actor has been energetic since not less than April 2025.
“The marketing campaign is focused in the direction of workers of KazMunaiGas or KMG the place the menace entity delivered a faux doc associated to the KMG IT division, mimicking official inside communication and leveraging themes equivalent to coverage updates, inside certification procedures, and wage changes,” safety researcher Subhajeet Singha mentioned.
The an infection chain begins with a phishing electronic mail containing a ZIP attachment, which features a Home windows shortcut (LNK) downloader, a decoy doc associated to KazMunaiGas, and a README.txt file with directions written in each Russian and Kazakh to run a program named “KazMunayGaz_Viewer.”
The e-mail, per the cybersecurity firm, was despatched from a compromised electronic mail handle of a person working within the finance division of KazMunaiGas and focused different workers of the agency in Might 2025.
The LNK file payload is designed to drop further payloads, together with a malicious batch script that paves the best way for a PowerShell loader dubbed DOWNSHELL. The assaults culminate with the deployment of a DLL-based implant, a 64-bit binary that may run shellcode to launch a reverse shell.
Additional evaluation of the menace actor’s infrastructure has revealed that it is hosted on the Russia-based bulletproof internet hosting (BPH) service supplier Aeza Group, which was sanctioned by the U.S. in July 2025 for enabling malicious actions.
The event comes as HarfangLab linked a Belarus-aligned menace actor often known as Ghostwriter (aka FrostyNeighbor or UNC1151) to campaigns concentrating on Ukraine and Poland since April 2025 with rogue ZIP and RAR archives which are aimed toward gathering details about compromised programs and deploying implants for additional exploitation.
“These archives comprise XLS spreadsheets with a VBA macro that drops and hundreds a DLL,” the French cybersecurity firm mentioned. “The latter is chargeable for gathering details about the compromised system and retrieving next-stage malware from a command-and-control (C2) server.”
Subsequent iterations of the marketing campaign have been discovered to put in writing a Microsoft Cupboard (CAB) file together with the LNK shortcut to extract and run the DLL from the archive. The DLL then proceeds to conduct preliminary reconnaissance earlier than dropping the next-stage malware from the exterior server.
The assaults concentrating on Poland, however, tweak the assault chain to make use of Slack as a beaconing mechanism and information exfiltration channel, downloading in return a second-stage payload that establishes contact with the area pesthacks[.]icu.
No less than in a single occasion, the DLL dropped by the macro-laced Excel spreadsheet is used to load a Cobalt Strike Beacon to facilitate additional post-exploitation exercise.
“These minor modifications recommend that UAC-0057 could also be exploring options, in a probable try and work round detection, however prioritizes the continuity or growth of its operations over stealthiness and class,” HarfangLab mentioned.
Cyber Assaults Reported In opposition to Russia
The findings come amid OldGremlin’s renewed extortion assaults on Russian firms within the first half of 2025, concentrating on as many as eight massive home industrial enterprises utilizing phishing electronic mail campaigns.
The intrusions, per Kaspersky, concerned the usage of the convey your individual weak driver (BYOVD) method to disable safety options on victims’ computer systems and the official Node.js interpreter to execute malicious scripts.
Phishing assaults aimed toward Russia have additionally delivered a brand new info stealer known as Phantom Stealer, which is predicated on an open-source stealer codenamed Stealerium, to gather a variety of delicate info utilizing electronic mail baits associated to grownup content material and funds. It additionally shares overlaps with one other Stealerium offshoot often known as Warp Stealer.
In line with F6, Phantom Stealer additionally inherits Stealerium’s “PornDetector” module that captures webcam screenshots when customers go to pornographic web sites by preserving tabs on the energetic browser window and whether or not the title features a configurable checklist of phrases like porn, and intercourse, amongst others.
“That is seemingly later used for ‘sextortion,'” Proofpoint mentioned in its personal evaluation of the malware. “Whereas this characteristic shouldn’t be novel amongst cybercrime malware, it’s not typically noticed.”
In current months, Russian organizations have additionally been on the receiving finish of assaults perpetrated by hacking teams tracked as Cloud Atlas, PhantomCore, and Scaly Wolf to reap delicate info and ship further payloads utilizing malware households equivalent to VBShower, PhantomRAT, and PhantomRShell.
One other cluster of exercise entails a brand new Android malware that masquerades as an antivirus instrument created by Russia’s Federal Safety Companies company (FSB) to single out representatives of Russian companies. The apps carry names like SECURITY_FSB, ФСБ (Russian for FSB), and GuardCB, the final of which is an try and cross off because the Central Financial institution of the Russian Federation.
First found in January 2025, the malware exfiltrates information from messenger and browser apps, stream from the cellphone’s digicam, and log keystrokes by searching for in depth permissions to entry SMS messages, location, audio, digicam. It additionally requests for operating within the background, system administrator rights, and accessibility companies.
“The app’s interface gives just one language – Russian,” Physician Net mentioned. “Thus, the malware is fully targeted on Russian customers. The backdoor additionally makes use of accessibility companies to guard itself from being deleted if it receives the corresponding command from the menace actors.”
