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Cisco Talos has tracked a campaign it calls UAT-6275, overlapping with the activity Recorded Future labels TAG-193 and associates with Silent Lynx. From June 2025 through August 2026, the operators used four delivery chains against government-related targets across nine countries, including a WinRAR exploit that placed a reverse shell in the Windows Startup folder.

What Talos found

Talos identified at least eight campaigns through May 2026. The activity reviewed continued through August 2026 and used publicly accessible staging infrastructure, including three exposed directories and a previously unreported GitHub repository. Directory contents and 77 GitHub commits revealed payload builds, tool inventories and changes to command-and-control infrastructure.

Seqrite first reported Silent Lynx publicly in January 2025. Talos uses the identifier UAT-6275, while Recorded Future uses TAG-193; the overlap supports treating them as the same or closely related activity, but the naming is not a formal public attribution.

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Who is being targeted

Observed lures and victims span Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia and Belarus. The sectors represented in the lures include:

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Examples include a letter addressed to Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, material referring to Uzbekistan’s Smart Forestry program and a Turkmennebit–Orsk Oil Refinery cooperation proposal. The Hacker News also reported a Turkmenistan airspace application form and said some phishing messages were sent from compromised government accounts.

Attribution assessment

Talos assesses a Kazakhstan nexus with medium confidence. Its assessment draws on access to infrastructure, language artifacts, malware submissions, working-hour patterns and regional targeting. The GitHub commit history showed activity patterns consistent with UTC+3 and UTC+5 working hours. That evidence indicates a likely regional connection, not proof of the operators’ nationality or physical location.

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Timeline of the campaign

Period Development
January 2025 Seqrite first publicly reported Silent Lynx.
June 2025 Talos observed the first chain, using macro-enabled Word documents.
July 2025 A PS2EXE-packaged PowerShell downloader began retrieving reverse shells and creating scheduled tasks.
October 2025 Malicious shortcuts inside RAR archives launched PowerShell and retrieved a script hosted on GitHub.
Through May 2026 Talos had identified at least eight campaigns.
April 2026 The first observed UAT-6275 chain to weaponize a vulnerability used a crafted RAR exploiting WinRAR CVE-2025-8088.
June 2025–August 2026 Talos’s reviewed activity window.

How the four attack chains work

The operators changed both the initial lure and the point at which code was made persistent. The following comparison separates what the campaign delivered from what defenders can observe.

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Chain Initial delivery Execution and persistence User interaction and vulnerability dependence Useful controls
A Macro-enabled Word document. Macro execution starts the malware; the report does not identify a separate persistence mechanism for this chain. The recipient must open the document and allow its macro-based execution. No software vulnerability is required. Office applications spawning scripts or binaries; macro-enabled files arriving from external senders.
B PS2EXE-packaged executable containing a PowerShell downloader. The downloader retrieves a reverse shell and creates a scheduled task. The executable must be run. No named vulnerability is required. PowerShell downloads, PS2EXE-like executables and new scheduled tasks.
C LNK shortcut inside a RAR archive, followed by a GitHub-hosted PowerShell script. Later samples downloaded PickleShell into the Windows Startup folder. The archive and shortcut must be handled by the user; no vulnerability is required. LNK files in archives, PowerShell retrieving code from a public service and writes to Startup folders.
D Crafted RAR archive exploiting WinRAR CVE-2025-8088. Exploitation places PickleShell in the Windows Startup folder so it runs at the next sign-in. The chain depends on vulnerable WinRAR and archive handling; Talos does not describe it as a zero-click compromise. Archive extraction events, WinRAR versions, Startup-folder writes and PickleShell execution after sign-in.

How the WinRAR CVE-2025-8088 chain works

In the April 2026 chain, the attacker supplied a specially crafted RAR file rather than relying only on a document macro or a shortcut. When the archive was processed by a vulnerable WinRAR installation, the exploit caused PickleShell to be written into the Windows Startup folder. At the victim’s next sign-in, Windows launched the shell from that folder, providing persistence without requiring the user to create a scheduled task.

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This was the first delivery chain Talos had observed from UAT-6275 that weaponized a vulnerability. The practical detection sequence is therefore: an archive arrives, WinRAR processes it, an unexpected file appears in a Startup directory, and that file executes at the next logon. Organizations should not infer that every RAR attachment is malicious, but they should treat crafted archives and unexplained Startup-folder changes as a high-priority investigation.

Payloads and signs of capability expansion

Exposed staging locations contained the reverse shells Chvost, Laplas and PickleShell. Corroborating coverage also identified FoalShell. The same infrastructure held Linux-compatible tooling and a proof of concept for FortiWeb CVE-2025-25257.

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Those files show preparation or interest in Linux hosts and internet-facing appliances. They do not establish that UAT-6275 successfully compromised Linux systems or FortiWeb devices. Defenders should use the artifacts to broaden hunting, while keeping confirmed Windows activity separate from unproven future operations.

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What government defenders should do now

Patch archive software first

Inventory WinRAR and other archive utilities, update them to versions that address CVE-2025-8088, and remove unmaintained copies. Include portable or user-installed archive programs in the inventory; a workstation can remain exposed even when centrally managed applications are current.

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Detect the execution patterns

  • Alert when Word or another Office application starts PowerShell, a command shell or an unsigned executable.
  • Review PowerShell that downloads scripts or binaries from public services such as GitHub, especially when the initiating process is an archive utility or Office application.
  • Monitor scheduled-task creation and record the creating process, task name, command line and author.
  • Monitor writes to Windows Startup folders and investigate new executables or scripts there.
  • Flag LNK files inside RAR archives and archives that create files outside the expected extraction directory.

Harden the delivery path

  • Block or quarantine macro-enabled Office files from untrusted external senders unless a documented business need exists.
  • Apply attachment and archive inspection at mail gateways, while preserving the original file for forensic analysis.
  • Restrict script execution and require signed administrative tooling where operationally feasible.
  • Review government mail accounts for unauthorized forwarding, new login locations and outbound phishing, because compromised accounts were reported in the campaign’s lures.

Use available detections

Talos lists ClamAV signatures and Snort rules for this activity. Deploy the relevant signatures and rules where those products are used, then validate that alerts include the parent process, command line, downloaded URL, archive name and destination path. If those controls are unavailable, equivalent endpoint, email, DNS and network detections can still target the behaviors above.

Why the activity matters

The campaign shows a deliberate move from familiar macro documents to packaged downloaders, scheduled tasks, public-service hosted scripts and finally a vulnerability-based archive chain. Cisco Talos security researcher Ashley Shen described the targeting as concentrated in Central Asia and the wider CIS region. Talos says the sustained activity and adoption of new delivery techniques suggest UAT-6275 will continue pursuing access to government organizations across Central Asia and the CIS.

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