Operation ForumTroll continues: Russian political scientists targeted using plagiarism reports


In March 2025, we discovered Operation ForumTroll, a series of sophisticated cyberattacks exploiting the CVE-2025-2783 vulnerability in Google Chrome. Kaspersky researchers previously detailed the malicious implants used in the operation: the LeetAgent backdoor and the complex spyware Dante, developed by Memento Labs (formerly Hacking Team). However, the attackers behind this operation didn’t stop at their spring campaign and have continued to infect targets within the Russian Federation.

In October 2025, just days before we presented our report detailing the ForumTroll APT group’s attack at the Security Analyst Summit, we detected a new targeted phishing campaign by the same group.

Read more…
Source: Kaspersky


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • Canada bans Chinese app WeChat from government devices

    October 30, 2023

    Canada has announced it will ban WeChat on government devices. The Chinese-owned app is sometimes referred to as the “everything app” – like WhatsApp, Facebook, Amazon and Tinder all in one. However Western governments have security concerns about it, mainly that the app could be used to spy on users. WeChat is one of the most ...

  • Step-by-step through the Money Message ransomware

    October 30, 2023

    In August 2023, the Sophos X-Ops Incident Response team was engaged to support an organization in Australia infected with Money Message ransomware. This attack vector, known for its stealth, does not append any file extensions to the encrypted data, making it harder for victims to identify the encrypted files simply by spotting such extensions. In ...

  • CloudKeys in the Air: Tracking Malicious Operations of Exposed IAM Keys

    October 30, 2023

    Unit 42 researchers have identified an active campaign we are calling EleKtra-Leak, which performs automated targeting of exposed identity and access management (IAM) credentials within public GitHub repositories. As a result of this, the threat actor associated with the campaign was able to create multiple AWS Elastic Compute (EC2) instances that they used for wide-ranging ...

  • TA571 Delivers IcedID Forked Loader

    October 30, 2023

    Proofpoint researchers identified TA571 delivering the Forked variant of IcedID in two campaigns on 11 and 18 October 2023. Both campaigns included over 6,000 messages, each impacting over 1,200 customers in a variety of industries globally. Emails in the campaigns purported to be replies to existing threads. This is known as thread hijacking. The emails contained ...

  • ING CISO says data sharing is key to financial cybersecurity

    October 30, 2023

    Compliance has been the traditional focus of IT departments in financial institutions, but as cyber threats continue to evolve, the financial industry needs to look to each other to help protect the wider ecosystem. Finextra spoke with Beate Zwijnenberg, chief information security officer at ING, about some of the challenges the bank is facing across ...

  • Casio Data Breach Impacts Customers in 149 Countries

    October 27, 2023

    Japanese electronics colossus Casio Computer Co., Ltd. has suffered a data breach on its ClassPad education platform, impacting customers in 149 countries. A technical failure on October 11, 2023, alerted Casio to the cyber intrusion that culminated in an unauthorized entity accessing the ClassPad development database on October 12, 2023. Casio launched an investigation and confirmed ...