Toy Ghouls deploys custom backdoors using HiveMQ MQTT and Element/Matrix as C2 against Russian organizations
Toy Ghouls (aka Bearlyfy, Laboo.boo, Feral Wolf), a financially motivated group targeting Russian organizations since 2025, was observed in early July 2026 using a custom backdoor for the first time. Kaspersky GERT identified two versions, mqtt-bird-agent 0.1.0 (C2 over the public HiveMQ MQTT broker) and matrix-bird-agent 0.1.0 (C2 over a…