Status

Active

Distinct actor

LOW 65%

Named actor

INSUFFICIENT

First observed

25 May 2026

Last updated

25 May 2026

Operator language

Russian-speaking (DEFINITE)

Motivation

Financial, cryptojacking of exposed GPU hosts

Note on UTA identifiers: "UTA" stands for Unattributed Threat Actor. UTA-2026-016 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

The higher-OPSEC of two customers of a commercial cryptojacking kit, running a userland rootkit, self-hosted pool proxies and a masqueraded QUIC backdoor against exposed machine-learning hosts, and still active weeks after the kit was publicly disclosed. The kit's author is a separately named actor; this designation covers only the customer.

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

77.110.96.200 (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

GHOST cryptojacker kitXMRigHysteria v2

MITRE ATT&CK

20 techniques across 9 tactics, read from the mapping tables of the reports about this actor, which keep their mapping on the companion detection page. Each technique links to where it is mapped.

Related designations

• UTA-2026-017: Sibling customer of the same kit; same-individual question unresolved at about one in five.

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.