Russia has long been a military power, a nuclear power, a space power and in recent decades, a cyber power. It has been one of the most capable cyber actors, going back to the late 1990s when Russian state hackers stole classified documents and military research from U.S. universities and government agencies. The stolen documents, if stacked on top of one another, would have been taller than the Washington Monument (555 feet or 169 meters). These incidents, dubbed “Moonlight Maze” as described in Thomas Rid’s book “Rise of the Machines,” marked one of the world’s first advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks. Russia’s intelligence and security agencies continue to operate highly skilled groups of offensive attackers. Those APT groups are spread across its intelligence and security agencies and the Ministry of Defense. They engage in a broad range of cyber and influence operations tied to Russia’s strategic objectives. These include exploiting adversary systems, establishing footholds, conducting cyber espionage operations and running disinformation and misinformation campaigns designed to undermine Western narratives. One of the most effective and long-running Russian groups is Turla, a unit known as Center 16 housed within Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. Researchers found that this group, which is active today, may have been connected with Moonlight Maze.

Turla, a well-known piece of malware, has taken to weaponising LNK-files to infect computers. We have observed a current example of this.

Security researchers discovered two previously unseen backdoors dubbed LunarWeb and LunarMail that were used to compromise a European government's diplomatic institutions abroad.

ESET researchers provide technical analysis of the Lunar toolset, likely used by the Turla APT group, that infiltrated a European ministry of foreign affairs

Summary Snake, also known as Turla, Uroburos and Agent.BTZ, is a relatively complex malware framework used for targeted attacks. Over the past year Fox-IT has been involved in multiple incident response cases where the Snake framework was used to steal sensitive information. Targets include government institutions, military and large corporates. Researchers who have previously analyzed…

An update on cyber activity in eastern Europe.

During our analysis of the Penquin-related infrastructure we reported in our previous post, we paid special attention to the malicious binaries contacting these IP addresses, since as we showed in the analysis, they had been used as C2 of other threats used by Turla.

For almost two decades, hackers with Snake have been forcing their way into government networks. They are considered one of the most dangerous hacker groups in the world. Who they work for, though, has always been a matter of pure speculation. But reporters with the German public broadcasters BR and WDR  have discovered some clues, and they all lead to the Russian secret service FSB.