A menace actor presumably of Russian origin has been attributed to a brand new set of assaults focusing 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 lively since at the very least April 2025.
“The marketing campaign is focused in direction of staff 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 similar to coverage updates, inside certification procedures, and wage changes,” safety researcher Subhajeet Singha stated.
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 deal with of a person working within the finance division of KazMunaiGas and focused different staff of the agency in Could 2025.
The LNK file payload is designed to drop extra 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 referred to as Ghostwriter (aka FrostyNeighbor or UNC1151) to campaigns focusing on Ukraine and Poland since April 2025 with rogue ZIP and RAR archives which might be aimed toward amassing details about compromised programs and deploying implants for additional exploitation.
“These archives comprise XLS spreadsheets with a VBA macro that drops and masses a DLL,” the French cybersecurity firm stated. “The latter is answerable for amassing 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 jot down 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 focusing on Poland, however, tweak the assault chain to make use of Slack as a beaconing mechanism and knowledge exfiltration channel, downloading in return a second-stage payload that establishes contact with the area pesthacks[.]icu.
Not 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 adjustments counsel that UAC-0057 could also be exploring alternate options, in a possible try and work round detection, however prioritizes the continuity or growth of its operations over stealthiness and class,” HarfangLab stated.
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, focusing on as many as eight giant home industrial enterprises utilizing phishing electronic mail campaigns.
The intrusions, per Kaspersky, concerned the usage of the carry your individual susceptible driver (BYOVD) method to disable safety options on victims’ computer systems and the professional Node.js interpreter to execute malicious scripts.
Phishing assaults aimed toward Russia have additionally delivered a brand new info stealer referred to as Phantom Stealer, which relies 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 referred to as Warp Stealer.
In keeping with F6, Phantom Stealer additionally inherits Stealerium’s “PornDetector” module that captures webcam screenshots when customers go to pornographic web sites by protecting tabs on the lively browser window and whether or not the title features a configurable checklist of phrases like porn, and intercourse, amongst others.
“That is doubtless later used for ‘sextortion,'” Proofpoint stated in its personal evaluation of the malware. “Whereas this function is just not novel amongst cybercrime malware, it isn’t usually noticed.”
In latest 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 extra payloads utilizing malware households similar to VBShower, PhantomRAT, and PhantomRShell.
One other cluster of exercise includes a brand new Android malware that masquerades as an antivirus device 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 knowledge from messenger and browser apps, stream from the telephone’s digital camera, and log keystrokes by looking for in depth permissions to entry SMS messages, location, audio, digital camera. It additionally requests for operating within the background, machine administrator rights, and accessibility providers.
“The app’s interface supplies just one language – Russian,” Physician Internet stated. “Thus, the malware is totally targeted on Russian customers. The backdoor additionally makes use of accessibility providers to guard itself from being deleted if it receives the corresponding command from the menace actors.”
