Particle.news
Download on the App Store

Kaspersky Ties ForumTroll Espionage Tools to Memento Labs’ ‘Dante’ Spyware

Researchers say the campaign used short-lived phishing pages exploiting a Chrome zero-day.

Overview

  • Kaspersky reports Operation ForumTroll targeted Russian government, media, financial, academic and research entities, with related activity also seen in Belarus.
  • Infections were triggered by personalized links that led to briefly active sites exploiting CVE-2025-2783 in Chromium browsers.
  • The primary payload observed was a backdoor Kaspersky calls LeetAgent, named for its leetspeak command syntax.
  • Code and tooling overlaps tie ForumTroll activity to Dante, a commercial spyware product attributed to Memento Labs, though Dante was observed in separate attacks linked to the group.
  • Google has patched the reported flaw after Kaspersky’s alert, and Kaspersky says further indicators and technical details will be shared with Threat Intelligence Portal subscribers as Memento Labs declined comment.