A beforehand unknown hacktivist group referred to as Punishing Owl has emerged with subtle cyberattacks focusing on Russian authorities safety businesses.
The group first surfaced on December 12, 2025, when it introduced the profitable breach of a Russian authorities safety company’s community.
The attackers printed stolen inner paperwork on a knowledge leak website and duplicated the information on a Mega.nz repository, demonstrating their intention to maximise public publicity of the compromise.
The group employed a number of assault strategies to amplify the impression of their operation. After getting access to the sufferer’s DNS configuration, Punishing Owl created a subdomain and modified DNS information to redirect site visitors to a server situated in Brazil.
This server hosted the stolen information together with a political manifesto explaining their motives.
The attackers strategically selected Friday night at 6:37 PM to announce the breach, timing calculated to delay response efforts and guarantee most visibility of their actions.
The group’s social media publish (Supply – Habr)
Following the preliminary breach, the group launched enterprise electronic mail compromise assaults towards the sufferer’s companions and contractors.
Habr analysts recognized that Punishing Owl despatched emails from a Brazilian server utilizing addresses created inside the sufferer’s electronic mail area.
These messages falsely claimed to substantiate the community compromise and included pressing requests to assessment hooked up paperwork.
The assault infrastructure revealed technical sophistication regardless of the group’s current emergence.
DLS useful resource with sufferer information (Supply – Habr)
Punishing Owl configured pretend TLS certificates, established IMAP and SMTP providers for electronic mail operations, and deployed the ZipWhisper PowerShell stealer to reap browser credentials from contaminated techniques.
The malicious emails contained password-protected ZIP archives with disguised LNK information that executed PowerShell instructions, downloading the stealer from a command-and-control server at bloggoversikten[.]com.
An infection Mechanism and Credential Theft
The ZipWhisper stealer operates via a multi-stage an infection course of designed to extract delicate browser knowledge from compromised hosts.
When victims open the disguised LNK file, it silently executes PowerShell instructions that obtain the stealer payload from the attacker’s infrastructure.
The malware then collects information containing net browser credentials, cookies, and saved passwords, packaging them into ZIP archives with particular naming patterns that embrace the username and chunk numbers.
Group manifesto (Supply – Habr)
These archives are saved briefly within the AppData/Native/Temp listing earlier than being uploaded to the command-and-control server via a personalized endpoint construction.
Mimicry of the C2 area (Supply – Habr)
Evaluation of the stealer’s code revealed feedback suggesting the doable use of AI instruments to generate parts of the malicious script, indicating the group could also be leveraging trendy growth methods to speed up their operations towards Russian vital infrastructure targets.
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