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Angry Birds: Toy Ghouls’ new toys
Kaspersky tracks ransomware group Toy Ghouls deploying new custom backdoors, mqtt-bird-agent and matrix-bird-agent, using HiveMQ MQTT and Element as C2 channels.
Kaspersky reports that Toy Ghouls (also known as Bearlyfy, Laboo.boo and Feral Wolf), a financially motivated group targeting Russian organizations since 2025, shifted from leaked Babuk and LockBit builders and public GitHub tools to its custom GenieLocker ransomware. In early July 2026 the group deployed two custom backdoors: mqtt-bird-agent 0.1.0 using the public HiveMQ MQTT broker as C2, and matrix-bird-agent 0.1.0 using the Element messenger. The backdoors are delivered via WinRM using Evil-WinRM and WinRM-fs, persist as Windows services, and encrypt their configuration with ChaCha20-Poly1305 keyed to the machine's MachineGuid registry value.
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DDoS Attacks Cause Major Threema Outages
Sustained distributed denial-of-service attacks knocked Swiss secure messenger Threema offline for hours before upstream filtering restored service; On-Prem users unaffected.
Threema suffered a series of large-scale DDoS attacks that left its Swiss secure messaging service unavailable for about four hours Tuesday evening, with intermittent outages into Wednesday morning until restoration at 12:23 p.m. CEST. Attacks also targeted colocation partner Nine and kept changing patterns, complicating mitigation. Threema deployed additional upstream DDoS protection on August 14 and plans status page improvements; Threema On-Prem customers running their own infrastructure were unaffected.
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