A beforehand undocumented menace actor has been attributed to assaults concentrating on Ukrainian organizations with malware referred to as CANFAIL.
Google Risk Intelligence Group (GTIG) described the hacking group as presumably affiliated with Russian intelligence providers. The menace actor is assessed to have focused protection, navy, authorities, and power organizations inside the Ukrainian regional and nationwide governments.
Nonetheless, the group has additionally exhibited rising curiosity in aerospace organizations, manufacturing firms with navy and drone ties, nuclear and chemical analysis organizations, and worldwide organizations concerned in battle monitoring and humanitarian support in Ukraine, GTIG added.
“Regardless of being much less refined and resourced than different Russian menace teams, this actor lately started to beat some technical limitations utilizing LLMs [large language models],” GTIG mentioned.
“By means of prompting, they conduct reconnaissance, create lures for social engineering, and search solutions to primary technical questions for post-compromise exercise and C2 infrastructure setup.”
Current phishing campaigns have concerned the menace actor impersonating legit nationwide and native Ukrainian power organizations to acquire unauthorized entry to organizational and private e mail accounts.
The group can be mentioned to have masqueraded as a Romanian power firm that works with clients in Ukraine, along with concentrating on a Romanian agency and conducting reconnaissance on Moldovan organizations.
To allow its operations, the menace actor generates e mail tackle lists tailor-made to particular areas and industries based mostly on their analysis. The assault chains seemingly include LLM-generated lures and embed Google Drive hyperlinks pointing to a RAR archive containing CANFAIL malware.
Usually disguised with a double extension to move off as a PDF doc (*.pdf.js), CANFAIL is an obfuscated JavaScript malware that is designed to execute a PowerShell script that, in flip, downloads and executes a memory-only PowerShell dropper. In parallel, it shows a pretend “error” message to the sufferer.
Google mentioned the menace actor can be linked to a marketing campaign known as PhantomCaptcha that was disclosed by SentinelOne SentinelLABS in October 2025 as concentrating on organizations related to Ukraine’s struggle aid efforts by means of phishing emails that direct recipients to pretend pages internet hosting ClickFix-style directions to activate the an infection sequence and ship a WebSocket-based trojan.
