Silent Lynx AI-agent espionage campaign — Central Asian governments and railways spied on via exposed server
Severity: high · Patch status: no-fix-needed · Since 2026-11-12
CloudSEK, a Singapore-based threat-intelligence firm, found an exposed server it links to the Silent Lynx espionage group (also tracked as Cavalry Werewolf and YoroTrooper, per The Record). The server held more than a dozen gigabytes of stolen government documents, tooling and logs. The logs show the operator, writing in Russian and steering the work through a Telegram bot, ran the open-source Hermes AI agent, mostly on DeepSeek models, to automate reconnaissance, data collection and trace removal; the agent was configured to run some potentially destructive commands without approval. From at least mid-August to early October 2026 the group had access to Tajikistan's national railway network, and used one railway employee's credentials to enter the national electronic document management platform. It took thousands of documents, including some 2026 Defense Ministry files, plus material on more than 100 government organisations. A server supporting Uzbekistan's Smart Forestry initiative was also compromised. Malicious lures posing as Turkmen official documents were built and tested in October; the researchers could not establish whether they reached anyone. CloudSEK assesses with medium confidence that the group has Kazakhstan ties; no link to the Kazakh government has been established. Recorded Future's earlier research on the same cluster (TAG-193 / UAT-6275) assessed it as likely Kazakhstan-based. The coverage publishes no indicators of compromise. No vendor fix applies; defenders should hunt for the lure documents and for credential misuse on railway and document-platform accounts.
What to do
- Hunt for phishing emails disguised as official Kyrgyz or Turkmen government correspondence and for credential misuse from railway or document-platform accounts
- Enforce MFA and credential rotation on government document management and railway networks
- Monitor for outbound connections to Telegram bots and unusual AI-agent or DeepSeek API usage on servers
- Segment railway and critical infrastructure networks from government correspondence platforms
- Review logs for signs of automated bulk document exfiltration and trace-erasing activity
Sources
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