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Turla is a Russia-linked advanced persistent threat group conducting cyberespionage against government organizations. Widely used aliases include Snake, Uroburos, Waterbug, Venomous Bear, Secret Blizzard, Krypton, Iron Hunter, Pensive Ursa, and Belugasturgeon. Its operations combine custom backdoors, publicly available offensive tools, and malware acquired by compromising other threat actors, including OilRig. Its toolset includes Carbon, HyperStack, Kazuar, and Penquin, with documented deployments against government entities. Turla uses spearphishing links and deceptive software-download lures for initial access. After compromise, it executes commands through Windows command shells and PowerShell, enumerates local-network systems and domain infrastructure, and transfers files between compromised machines through RPC backdoors. HyperStack can access remote network shares using default credentials. Turla has obtained and customized Mimikatz and has used Metasploit and PowerSploit for reflective DLL and PE injection. It has also exploited vulnerable signed VirtualBox drivers to obtain kernel-mode privileges. Defense-evasion techniques include encrypted PowerShell payloads, salted Triple DES encryption, Base64 encoding, randomized variable names, and custom decryption routines that retrieve key material from WMI filters or PowerShell profiles. Its collection and exfiltration activity includes stealing files from connected USB drives and packaging them into encrypted RAR archives before exfiltration. Turla's documented activity is espionage-oriented rather than ransomware or extortion.
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; click through for MITRE's full description.
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
This detection identifies instances where Windows Explorer.exe spawns PowerShell or cmd.exe processes, particularly focusing on executions initiated by LNK files. This behavior is associated with the ZDI-CAN-25373 Windows shortcut zero-day vulnerability, where specially crafted LNK files are used to trigger malicious code execution through cmd.exe or powershell.exe. This technique has been actively exploited by multiple APT groups in targeted attacks through both HTTP and SMB delivery methods.
4 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
561 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 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.
Turla is listed in the detection's annotations.
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.