- Category
- Targeted, sponsor unknown · Targeted intrusions with no sponsor attributed.
- Origin
- Unknown
- Sources
- 3 sources carry it
- Identifier
- GINC-APT-0992 · team46
What it is
Team46 is a sophisticated APT group active since at least late 2024, targeting Russian government, academic, and media organizations through spearphishing emails disguised as forum invitations or service notifications. They exploit zero-day vulnerabilities like CVE-2025-2783 in Google Chrome (March 2025, Operation ForumTroll) and CVE-2024-6473 in Yandex Browser, deploying multi-stage loaders (e.g., winsta.dll, donut shellcode) that decrypt payloads using machine-specific keys like firmware UUID for environmental guardrails. Key malware includes the Trinper backdoor for keylogging, clipboard theft, file/process discovery, and encrypted C2 exfiltration over HTTPS with domain fronting, alongside auxiliary .NET tools (dirlist.exe, ProcessList.exe) and variants using Cobalt Strike or Dante backdoor; the group employs obfuscation, AMSI bypasses, debugger evasion, and self-deletion for persistence and stealth. Positive Technologies attributes TaxOff operations to Team46 based on identical PowerShell patterns, loaders, and hyphenated CDN-mimicking infrastructure (e.g., ms-appdata-*.global.ssl.fastly.net).
Names
The names each vendor, agency and source gives it. Naming differs by who tracks the actor, so one group carries many.
- Other names
- TaxOff
Tools
The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.
- Backdoor.Oldrea
- Chrome Remote Desktop
- Cobalt Strike
- POWERSOURCE
- POWERSTATS
- Power Loader
- PowerDuke
- PowerRAT
- Xploit
Sources
- Malpedia malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de