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Turla is a Russian state-linked cyberespionage group known for compromising government organizations and maintaining persistent access to victim networks. It is also tracked as Secret Blizzard, Venomous Bear, Waterbug, Snake, Uroburos, Krypton, Iron Hunter, Pensive Ursa, and BelugaSturgeon. Its targeting spans numerous countries, prominently including Ukraine, Germany, the United States, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. Turla combines custom backdoors, publicly available offensive tools, and malware acquired through the compromise of other threat actors, including OilRig. Its documented toolset includes Carbon, HyperStack, Kazuar, and Penquin, alongside Metasploit, PowerSploit, and customized Mimikatz. Initial-access techniques include spearphishing links that impersonate legitimate software downloads. Persistence mechanisms include Windows Registry autostart entries and Startup-folder execution. The group enumerates local-network systems, domain computers, domain controllers, and Exchange servers, and uses RPC backdoors to execute commands and transfer files between compromised machines. HyperStack can access remote network shares using default credentials. Turla has used reflective DLL and PE injection and exploited vulnerabilities in a VirtualBox driver to obtain kernel-mode privileges. Its defense-evasion techniques include encrypted PowerShell payloads, randomized variable names, Base64 encoding, and custom decryption routines that retrieve cryptographic material from other system artifacts. It has also collected files from connected USB drives and encrypted stolen data in archives before exfiltration.
Mallory correlates actor tradecraft and target patterns against your stack, your sector, and your geography. See overlap before they land.
Who, where, and (when attributed) which flag flies behind the operation. Pulled from open-source reporting and Mallory's analyst review.
Sectors the actor has been observed targeting.
Geographies tied to known operations.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
68 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt.
46 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
41 additional families tracked in Mallory.
9 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 9 of them exploited in the wild.
That campaign used malicious RAR archives exploiting a WinRAR path traversal flaw tracked as CVE-2025-8088.
The Java files exploit a popular vulnerability, CVE-2012-1723, in various configurations.
CVE-2013-3346 – Arbitrary code-execution vulnerability in Adobe Reader
The attacks are known to have used at least two zero-day exploits: CVE-2013-5065 – Privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows XP and Windows 2003
The table lists CVE-2019-11510 in Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure, multiple associated threat actors, and nine ransomware associations.
4 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
567 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Listed as associated with exploitation of CVE-2019-11510; not attributed to the infrastructure activity investigated in this article.
Listed in the detection's technique annotations; the content does not attribute ShieldCrash exploitation to this group.
Listed as an annotation to a renamed-Python-binary detection; no actor-specific campaign or behavior is described.
Match sector + geo + tech-stack targeting against your real footprint.
Every observed MITRE ATT&CK technique, grouped by tactic.
Families this actor is known to deploy, with IOCs and behavior.
CVEs this actor has used in known campaigns.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Domains, IPs, and hashes tied to this actor, refreshed continuously.