Status

Active

Distinct actor

MODERATE 78%

Named actor

INSUFFICIENT

First observed

15 May 2026

Last updated

21 Aug 2026

Operator language

Russian-speaking (HIGH)

Motivation

Financial (HIGH)

Note on UTA identifiers: "UTA" stands for Unattributed Threat Actor. UTA-2026-009 is a tracking label The Hunters Ledger assigns to an actor I have observed but cannot yet link to a publicly named threat group. Other vendors and feeds will not use this label; it is specific to this publication. If later evidence ties the activity to a named actor, I will retire the label and update the report.

Summary

A nearly three-year operation spanning a commercial VPN, a phishing subdomain library of several hundred brand impersonations, business-email burn domains and a fake exchange, across two sanctioned hosting providers. One supporting characteristic was withdrawn in August 2026 as a hosting-platform default and the report records that retraction.

The confidence levels above are the published report's figures. Every claim on this page is a summary of the linked reports, which remain the record.

Targeting

Targeting is given as region and sector, drawn from the reports. Victim names are deliberately not published here or in the reports.

Reports

Actor identifiers

Artifacts this operator chose or created: handles, channels, operator brands and domains, wallets and the like. Each is printed in a report linked above; the full indicator set, with its caveats, is in each report's IOC feed.

Infrastructure and tooling

Primary host

185.221.196.118 (the operator-controlled host the assigning report is named for; the full indicator set, with its caveats, is in each report's IOC feed)

Tooling

EspoCRM back-officeMarzban panelcustom web stack

MITRE ATT&CK

55 techniques across 12 tactics, read from the mapping tables of the reports about this actor. Each technique links to where it is mapped.

Related designations

• UTA-2026-008: Co-tenant on the same staging host; linkage assessed LOW and actively rebutted.
• UTA-2026-010: Co-tenant on the same staging host; zero indicator overlap.

Actor profiles and the reports behind them are © Joseph, The Hunter's Ledger, licensed CC BY 4.0: free to use, including commercially, with attribution. All tracked actors.