2,000 leaked files expose Bauman University’s hidden Department No. 4, which trained GRU-linked hackers and propagandists linked to APT28 and Sandworm.

Leaked Documents Expose Bauman University’s Hidden Department That Trained Hackers, Propagandists, and Malware Developers for the GRU

More than 2,000 internal documents from Bauman Moscow State Technical University have been reviewed by an international media consortium, and the picture they describe is not a conventional cybersecurity program. The files span academic and administrative records through 2025.

“Recently leaked records show that Bauman Moscow State Technical University’s Department No. 4 operated as a long-term training pipeline for Russian military intelligence and cyber operations.” reads the report published by DomainTools. “The department served several elements of the Russian General Staff and trained roughly 250 career and reserve students across three specialties: special intelligence (“Служба специальной разведки”), operational information-technical effects (“Применение сил и средств информационно-технического воздействия и защиты от информационно-технического воздействия”), and information-technology protection (”3ащита информационных технологий”). “

Department No. 4, also called “Special Training,” operated inside Bauman’s Military Training Center and doesn’t appear anywhere on the university’s public organizational chart. The GRU’s talent pipeline tends not to announce itself.

The investigation was carried out by a group of media outlets including The Insider, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Delfi, VSquare, and FRONTSTORY.PL. DomainTools researchers also analyzed the leaked files independently. A DarkForums user known as “Losyash” may have shared the data, but it has not been confirmed that the account originally obtained the records.

The department trained students in three military specialties. These covered special intelligence, information and cyber operations, and the protection of IT systems. In practice, the courses included espionage, offensive cyber operations, electronic reconnaissance, secure systems, and influence operations.

Around 250 career and reserve students went through the program over six academic years. Researchers estimate that 10 to 15 students each year were selected for GRU-related assignments before graduating.

“Technical protection training covered cryptography and steganography, as well as code analysis and intrusion detection. Students were also trained in hardware inspection, the discovery of physical implants, and the identification of undocumented device functions. These subjects point to possible assignments in technical counterintelligence and supply chain security, as well as firmware analysis and embedded system inspection. Other likely functions include secure procurement and the protection of specialized military platforms.” continues the report. “The files also reveal an underreported malware-analysis and cyber threat intelligence program.”

One advanced practical assignment required the creation of a social-media video built around what the course materials called “manipulation, pressure, and hidden propaganda.” This counted as coursework.

Course materials defined “information-technical weapons” as tools and methods designed to alter, destroy, copy, block, or manipulate information. Red-team and blue-team functions were treated as a single discipline, not separate tracks, which mirrors how Russian military doctrine actually deploys cyber operators.

The personnel links are what make this more than a training curiosity. The leaked records identify Major General Viktor Netyksho as involved in Department No. 4’s oversight. Netyksho was the former commander of Military Unit 26165, the GRU formation publicly associated with APT28, also tracked as Fancy Bear, Sofacy, and STRONTIUM. He was among the 12 GRU officers indicted by the United States in 2018 for interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“Reporting identified graduates assigned to GRU Military Unit 26165 (associated with APT28) and Military Unit 74455 (associated with Sandworm), and linked senior officers, including former Unit 26165 commander Viktor Netyksho, to student oversight.” continues the report. “The data also connected senior GRU officers to the supervision and evaluation of Bauman students. Viktor Netyksho, the former commander of Unit 26165 and the 85th Main Special Service Center, is part of the department’s teaching and oversight structure.”

The reporting also identifies Aleksei Kondrashov, a 2024 Department No. 4 graduate, as linked to Military Unit 74455: the GRU’s Main Center for Special Technologies, known publicly as Sandworm, or APT44. That unit has been associated with the 2017 NotPetya attack and ongoing destructive operations against Ukraine. DomainTools also connected graduates and senior staff to Military Unit 29155, a GRU formation linked to sabotage and assassination operations in Europe.

A necessary precision: the reports establish unit placements, not individual operational involvement. A documented assignment to Military Unit 74455 doesn’t establish that a specific person participated in a specific attack. That distinction matters for both attribution work and legal proceedings.

What the leak does establish is the factory behind the names. APT28 and Sandworm are the threat groups that security teams track, attribute, and brief about. Department No. 4 is where some of the people running those operations were systematically trained, assessed, and selected.

For defenders, DomainTools summarizes the implication precisely: Russian operations should be tracked as a combined threat in which espionage, destructive attacks, military reconnaissance, technical surveillance, and influence campaigns draw on the same personnel pipelines and the same underlying doctrine. The Bauman material makes that pipeline visible for the first time at this level of institutional detail.

“The documents show that Department No. 4 is a small part of a larger long-term military training system, not a single hacking unit. The program prepared personnel for espionage and offensive cyber operations within a larger Russian technical university system.” concludes the report. “Its doctrine treated cyber warfare as more than network intrusion. Students were taught not only adversarial cyber warfare, but also a larger holistic doctrine of cyber war using both defense and attack to be better able to carry out successful campaigns.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Russia)

Insikt Group ties HOOKEDGE malware to Russian group BlueDelta (APT28), hitting EU diplomatic targets via webhook abuse and macro-enabled Word lures.

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The post HOOKEDGE Malware: BlueDelta Hits EU Diplomatic Targets appeared first on Daily CyberSecurity.

BlueDelta (APT28) uses webhook.site and Microsoft Edge to hide HOOKEDGE espionage traffic targeting European governments.

Recorded Future’s Insikt Group documented a campaign by BlueDelta, the Russian GRU-linked group that overlaps with the group APT28, running an entire espionage operation against European government targets using webhook.site, a service built for developers to test HTTP requests, as its command-and-control backbone.

The campaign ran from late September 2025 through early April 2026, targeting government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain, and Türkiye.

“The campaigns delivered a lightweight Windows batch-script backdoor, dubbed “HOOKEDGE,” via macro-enabled Microsoft Word documents using diplomatic-themed lures, including material impersonating Spain’s Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes, created shortly after a September 2025 meeting between Spanish and Moldovan officials.” states the report by Insikt Group.

“Insikt Group assesses with moderate confidence that this activity was conducted by BlueDelta (which overlaps with APT28, Fancy Bear, and Forest Blizzard), a Russian state-sponsored threat group attributed to the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU).”

The attackers used a fairly old-school trick: macro-enabled Word documents. One of them looked like a real meeting agenda from Spain’s Ministry of the Presidency and appeared shortly after an actual meeting between Spanish and Moldovan officials. The timing was interesting because it came just before Moldova’s September 2025 parliamentary elections. The document looked credible enough to make the phishing attempt believable.

The backdoor, called HOOKEDGE, is surprisingly simple. It uses a Windows batch script and relies on two webhooks. One receives commands, while the other sends the stolen data back to the attackers. Every 30 minutes, a scheduled task downloads a command file through Microsoft Edge, runs it and sends the results to another endpoint. The malware uses Edge to make the traffic look like normal web activity, making it harder for security tools to spot.

That reliance on a real browser for both tasking and exfiltration is the cleverest part of the whole design.

“A notable aspect of HOOKEDGE is its use of msedge.exe for both tasking and exfiltration. By generating network traffic through a legitimate web browser rather than a commonly abused LotL binary (LOLBin) or a custom binary, the malware blends its communications with normal enterprise browsing activity.” continues the report.

Recorded Future explains, and that’s really the entire evasion strategy in one sentence: don’t build something exotic, just make your traffic look exactly like an employee checking a website.

BlueDelta didn’t build HOOKEDGE from scratch either. It shares deep code and structural overlap with HEADLACE, a backdoor the same group used years earlier, right down to identical JavaScript variable names and the same base64 encoding scheme for automated downloads.

“HOOKEDGE’s code and structural design have significant overlap with HEADLACE, a backdoor used by BlueDelta in previous campaigns.” states the report.

Recorded Future assesses with moderate confidence that HOOKEDGE is a direct evolutionary successor, maintained by the same operators rather than a fresh tool built by a different team, which fits BlueDelta’s long-documented habit of refining working tradecraft instead of reinventing it.

The operation also included a triage mechanism worth understanding on its own. Once a victim showed signs of being worth deeper attention, active communication with the initial webhook endpoints, BlueDelta deployed a second HOOKEDGE payload configured to check in every five minutes instead of thirty, giving operators much faster interactive control over higher-value targets. That two-tier setup also solved a practical infrastructure problem: webhook.site’s free tier caps out at 100 requests per endpoint, so spreading routine and high-priority tasking across separate endpoints kept any single one from getting exhausted mid-operation.

BlueDelta kept tuning the operation continuously rather than treating it as a finished product. Beaconing intervals stretched from 30 minutes to 61, deliberately timed to slip past sandbox environments that typically only watch a sample’s behavior for an hour. The group added canary tracking pixels named things like mailopened.jpg and docopened.jpg to monitor exactly when a phishing email got opened versus when the document itself got opened versus when macros actually executed, essentially building analytics for their own phishing funnel.

“The malicious document also contains a hidden image referencing a remote webhook URL: hxxp://webhook[.]site/62114596-33f5-47fb-9012-0223529e5a13/docopened[.]jpg. This serves as a document-open “canary,” alerting BlueDelta operators when a victim opens the lure. Later variants used the filename doc.jpg in place of docopened.jpg.” states Insik. “Insikt Group also identified webhooks using the filename mailopened.jpg, indicating that BlueDelta likely used a similar canary mechanism to monitor when recipients opened phishing emails, providing operators with visibility into campaign delivery success before any payload execution.”

That kind of detailed tracking of what victims do would look very familiar to a marketing team. The difference is that here the targets are victims, not customers.

For defenders, the useful indicators are quite clear. Block macros in documents downloaded from the internet, monitor scheduled tasks that launch scripts from user-writable folders, and flag Microsoft Edge running in headless mode or making automated connections to file-sharing and webhook services that the organization does not normally use. You don’t need sophisticated tools to spot these behaviors. Even a well-configured monitoring system should be able to detect them early. The worrying part is that a persistent, state-backed group can still rely on a small set of behaviors that defenders can identify and block.

For defenders, the actionable pieces here are concrete rather than abstract. Block macro execution from documents that arrived over the internet, watch for scheduled tasks spawning script interpreters from user-writable folders, and specifically flag Microsoft Edge running in headless mode or making automated requests to file-hosting and webhook services your organization doesn’t actually use for anything legitimate. None of this requires exotic tooling to catch, which is oddly reassuring: a threat group this persistent and state-backed is still, at its core, relying on the same handful of detectable behaviors that a properly configured monitoring setup would catch on day one.

“BlueDelta is likely to continue conducting initial access campaigns against European government and diplomatic organizations in support of Russian intelligence collection. Given the enduring strategic importance of European governance, NATO-related affairs, and diplomatic engagement with former Soviet republics, the intelligence requirements driving this activity are unlikely to diminish in the near term.” concludes the report.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, BlueDelta)

Hackers compromised hotel Wi-Fi gateways to redirect users to fake Microsoft 365 login pages and steal credentials.

ReliaQuest’s threat research team just documented attackers compromising the Wi-Fi gateways at hotels and conference centers, then quietly rerouting guests toward fake Microsoft login pages. No phishing email required. No malicious attachment. Just bad luck about which hotel you picked.

“Adversaries have been compromising public Wi-Fi gateways at hotels, conference centers, and other shared venues to hijack the accounts of traveling corporate employees.” reads the report published by ReliaQuest. “Once they control the Wi-Fi gateway, they quietly redirect users to attacker-controlled infrastructure to steal credentials, in activity ongoing since at least June 2026.”

The mechanism is simple once you see it. These gateways handle DNS for every device that connects, so whoever controls the gateway controls where your traffic actually goes, even when the address bar looks completely normal. ReliaQuest found compromised devices across several US cities plus India and Saudi Arabia, hitting employees from finance, law, healthcare, energy, and retail, which tells you this isn’t aimed at one industry. It’s aimed at anyone who travels for work.

Researchers think the entry point was weak or reused admin credentials on internet-facing management interfaces, things like exposed SSH or web consoles.

“ReliaQuest assesses with low-to-medium confidence that initial access into these devices exploited exposed management interfaces (including internet-facing SSH, SNMP, and web administration consoles) in combination with weak or reused administrative credentials.” continues the report. “We encountered visibility constraints into the individual devices that prevented confirmation of this hypothesis, but this methodology would be consistent with the gateway targeting and DNS poisoning patterns documented in recent reporting on an APT28-linked campaign known as “FrostArmada.””

Once inside, the attackers pointed DNS toward domains built to look like Microsoft’s login pages, including m365-owa.com and ms365-live.com. The whole thing runs on trust, since a device joining a network just assumes the DNS resolver it’s handed is telling the truth.

That trust gets abused in a way that dodges the DNS protections people already have. Switching to a hardcoded resolver like 8.8.8.8 doesn’t save you, because the query still leaves the laptop unencrypted and the gateway can rewrite the answer before it ever reaches Google’s server. Encrypted DNS tools help only if they run in strict mode; the default “opportunistic” mode quietly falls back to plaintext the moment encryption fails, and that fallback is exactly what gets hijacked.

“Two configurations do stop it. A full-tunnel VPN routes all DNS through the corporate tunnel before the gateway can touch the request. Encrypted DNS in strict mode (DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS with plaintext fallback disabled) ensures the gateway can’t forge a response.” states the cybersecurity firm. “Most DNS encryption tools default to opportunistic mode, which permits plaintext fallback when encrypted resolution fails. That fallback is what the gateway redirects, making opportunistic mode insufficient; only strict mode closes the gap.”

ReliaQuest also caught something extra in about a third of cases: an attempt to abuse Windows’ automatic proxy discovery feature, known as WPAD.

WPAD is a Windows feature that automatically discovers proxy settings when a device connects to a network. In this campaign, attackers abused it by controlling DNS responses, potentially tricking Windows into loading a malicious proxy configuration. If successful, they could intercept traffic from browsers, authentication services, and enterprise apps. Because the traffic still uses HTTPS, the attack can blend in with normal network activity and be difficult to detect.

Pull that off and the attacker routes a much wider slice of an employee’s traffic, not just login attempts, through their own proxy. In a smaller number of cases, the attackers skipped credential theft entirely and went after Microsoft’s device-code sign-in flow instead, tricking users into approving a login they didn’t realize belonged to someone else. Approve that prompt and the attacker walks away with a valid, MFA-cleared session token, no password needed.

“In roughly one-third of observed cases—Windows devices that didn’t have Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) disabled, or Mac devices—the attacker also attempted WPAD abuse. If successful, it routes all Windows application traffic through the attacker’s proxy, broadening the redirection surface well beyond authentication traffic.” continues the report. “This technique wasn’t documented in prior FrostArmada-linked reporting, making it one of the clearest distinctions between this campaign and previously observed APT28 activity.”

There’s a pattern connecting all this to previous campaigns. The tradecraft echoes a Russian-linked operation called FrostArmada, which hit home routers the same way earlier this year, and researchers tie both to the group known as APT28 (aka UAC-0001, aka Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, Sofacy Group, Sednit, BlueDelta, and STRONTIUM). The link isn’t a smoking gun; it’s shared technique, not shared infrastructure, and the researchers say so plainly.

The fix is almost boringly simple, which is rare in this line of work. Force every corporate device onto an always-on VPN with full-tunnel routing, so DNS never touches the hotel network at all, and shut off split-tunnel exceptions that would let it sneak through anyway. Disable WPAD where nobody needs it, block Microsoft’s device-code flow at the identity provider unless someone has a real reason to keep it, and train people to check the certificate before they type a password on airport or hotel Wi-Fi.

None of this requires new budget or a six-month project. It requires someone actually flipping the switches that already exist.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Hotel Wi-Fi )

DNS Hijacking and Adversary-in-the-Middle Tactics 

U.S. Operation Targets APT28 Infrastructure 

Official Statements on the Threat 

How the FBI Disrupted the DNS Hijacking Network 

• The FBI sent commands to compromised routers to collect evidence of APT28 activity. 
• Reset DNS settings, removing malicious resolvers and restoring legitimate ISP configurations.
• Blocked the actors’ ability to regain unauthorized access. 

Continued Router Exploitation and Infrastructure Tactics 

• Cluster One: Focused on modifying DHCP DNS settings in SOHO routers, enabling selective DNS hijacking and adversary-in-the-middle attacks.  
• Cluster Two: Involved forwarding DNS traffic through a layered infrastructure, with some operations targeting high-value devices, including those in Ukraine.  

Targeted Services and Indicators 

• autodiscover-s.outlook[.]com  
• imap-mail.outlook[.]com  
• outlook.live[.]com  
• outlook.office[.]com  
• outlook.office365[.]com  

Mitigation and Security Recommendations 

• Replace end-of-life or unsupported routers  
• Update firmware to the latest available versions  
• Verify DNS settings to ensure they point to legitimate resolvers  
• Disable or secure remote management interfaces  
• Implement firewall rules to limit exposure  
• Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) to reduce credential abuse  
• Users are also encouraged to monitor their networks and report suspected compromises to appropriate authorities. 

Right after Microsoft disclosed an actively exploited Office zero-day (CVE-2026-21509) on January 26, 2026, CERT-UA reported UAC-0001 (APT28) leveraging the vulnerability in the wild. The russia-backed threat actor targeted organizations in Ukraine and the EU with malicious Office documents, and metadata shows one sample was created on January 27 at 07:43 UTC, illustrating the rapid weaponization of CVE-2026-21509.

Detect UAC-0001 aka APT28 Activity Based on the CERT-UA#19542 Alert

APT28 (UAC-0001) has a long record of conducting cyber operations aligned with russian state interests, with a persistent focus on Ukraine and its allied partners. Ukraine frequently serves as an initial testing environment for newly developed tactics, techniques, and procedures that are later scaled to broader international targets. 

The latest UAC-0001 campaign in the limelight follows the same pattern. According to CERT-UA#19542, UAC-0001 targeted Ukrainian state bodies with malicious Office documents exploiting CVE-2026-21509 to deploy the COVENANT framework. The same attack pattern was later observed against EU organizations, demonstrating rapid operational expansion beyond Ukraine.

Sign up for the SOC Prime Platform to proactively defend your organization against UAC-0001 (APT28) attacks exploiting CVE-2026-21509. Just press Explore Detections below and access a relevant detection rule stack, enriched with AI-native CTI, mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK® framework, and compatible with a wide range of SIEM, EDR, and Data Lake technologies.

Explore Detections

Security experts can also use the “CERT-UA#19542” tag based on the relevant CERT-UA alert identifier to search for the detection stack directly and track any content changes.  For more rules to detect attacks related to the UAC-0001 adversary activity, security teams can search the Threat Detection Marketplace library leveraging the “UAC-0001” or “APT28” tags based on the group identifier, as well as the relevant “CVE-2026-21509” tag addressing the Microsoft Office zero-day exploitation.

Additionally, users can refer to a dedicated Active Threats item on the UAC-0001 (APT28) latest attacks to access the AI summary, related detection rules, simulations, and the attack flow in one place.

Security teams can also rely on Uncoder AI to create detections from raw threat reports, document and optimize code, and generate Attack Flows. Additionally, cyber defenders can easily convert IOCs from the latest CERT-UA#19542 alert into performance-optimized queries compatible with your security stack.

Analyzing UAC-0001 (APT28) Attacks Exploiting CVE-2026-21509

In late January 2026, CERT-UA observed a series of targeted cyber attacks attributed to UAC-0001 (APT28) that leveraged an actively exploited Microsoft Office vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-21509. The malicious activity emerged shortly after Microsoft publicly disclosed the flaw and was initially directed at Ukrainian government entities before expanding to organizations across the European Union.

To establish initial access, attackers distributed specially crafted Microsoft Word documents exploiting CVE-2026-21509. One document, titled “Consultation_Topics_Ukraine(Final).doc,” referenced COREPER, the Committee of Permanent Representatives of the EU, which prepares decisions and coordinates policy among EU member states. Although the file became publicly accessible on January 29, metadata analysis showed it had been created on January 27 (one day after Microsoft’s advisory), indicating rapid weaponization of the vulnerability.

In parallel, CERT-UA received reports of phishing emails impersonating official correspondence from the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Center. These messages, sent to more than 60 recipients primarily within central executive authorities of Ukraine, contained malicious DOC attachments. When opened in Microsoft Office, the documents established a network connection to an external resource over WebDAV and downloaded a shortcut file containing code designed to retrieve and launch an executable file.

Successful execution of the downloaded payload results in the creation of a malicious DLL file, EhStoreShell.dll, masquerading as the legitimate Enhanced Storage Shell Extension library, and an image file (SplashScreen.png) containing shellcode. The attack also modifies the Windows registry path for CLSID {D9144DCD-E998-4ECA-AB6A-DCD83CCBA16D}, implementing COM hijacking, and creates a scheduled task named OneDriveHealth.

Scheduled execution of the task causes the explorer.exe process to terminate and restart, which (due to the COM hijacking) ensures the loading of EhStoreShell.dll. The DLL executes shellcode from the image file, ultimately resulting in the launch of the COVENANT framework. Command-and-control communications for COVENANT relied on legitimate cloud storage infrastructure provided by Filen (filen.io).

Toward the end of January 2026, CERT-UA identified additional documents using the same exploit chain and delivery mechanisms in attacks against EU-based organizations. Technical overlaps in document structure, embedded URLs, and supporting infrastructure suggest these incidents were part of a coordinated UAC-0001 (APT28) campaign, demonstrating the rapid scaling of the operation beyond its initial Ukrainian targets.

Given the active exploitation of a Microsoft Office zero-day and the challenges many organizations face in promptly applying patches or mitigations, further abuse of CVE-2026-21509 is expected in the near term. 

To reduce the attack surface, organizations should implement the mitigation measures outlined in Microsoft’s advisory, including recommended Windows registry configurations. In addition, as UAC-0001 (APT28) leverages legitimate Filen cloud infrastructure for COVENANT command-and-control operations, network interactions with Filen-related domains and IP addresses should be restricted or placed under enhanced monitoring.

Additionally, security experts can rely on SOC Prime’s AI-Native Detection Intelligence Platform, which equips SOC teams with cutting-edge technologies and top cybersecurity expertise to stay ahead of APT28 attacks while maintaining operational effectiveness. 

MITRE ATT&CK Context

Leveraging MITRE ATT&CK offers in-depth insight into the latest UAC-0001 (APT28) attacks leveraging CVE-2026-21509 exploit to target Ukrainian and EU entities. The table below displays all relevant Sigma rules mapped to the associated ATT&CK tactics, techniques, and sub-techniques.

The post UAC-0001 (APT28) Attack Detection: russia-Backed Actor Actively Exploits CVE-2026-21509 Targeting Ukraine and the EU appeared first on SOC Prime.