espionage2 articles
GoSerpent Malware Has Been Quietly Raiding Southeast Asian Governments for Months
Cybersecurity researchers at Kaspersky have uncovered a previously undocumented malware called GoSerpent, which has been targeting government and diplomatic entities in Southeast Asia since late 2025 for espionage and long-term intelligence gathering. The malware connects to a command-and-control server to deploy secondary payloads capable of credential dumping, file collection, and data exfiltration, while also supporting SOCKS5 proxying to mask attackers' true IP addresses. The campaign shares similarities with the known threat actor TetrisPhantom, though definitive attribution remains uncertain, and a separate but related espionage operation by DoNot Team was also disclosed, targeting Bangladesh's military using spear-phishing emails.
BusySnake: The Python Stealer Quietly Targeting Governments and Power Grids
A threat actor called Armored Likho has been conducting cyber espionage and financially motivated attacks against government agencies and energy sector organisations in Russia, Brazil, and Kazakhstan, using spear-phishing emails as the initial entry point. The group deploys a newly discovered Python-based malware called BusySnake Stealer, which harvests credentials, browser cookies, keystrokes, cryptocurrency wallets, and Telegram data, while evading detection through dynamic bytecode encryption and obfuscation techniques. Kaspersky has linked Armored Likho to the previously tracked Eagle Werewolf cluster, noting the group is actively refining its toolkit — including integrating reverse SSH tunnelling directly into the stealer — and may be using AI tools to assist in generating its first-stage payloads.