The risk actor behind the GIFTEDCROOK malware has made important updates to show the trojan horse from a fundamental browser knowledge stealer to a potent intelligence-gathering instrument.
“Latest campaigns in June 2025 reveal GIFTEDCROOK’s enhanced means to exfiltrate a broad vary of delicate paperwork from the gadgets of focused people, together with doubtlessly proprietary recordsdata and browser secrets and techniques,” Arctic Wolf Labs stated in a report revealed this week.
“This shift in performance, mixed with the content material of its phishing lures, […] suggests a strategic concentrate on intelligence gathering from Ukrainian governmental and navy entities.”
GIFTEDCROOK was first documented by the Pc Emergency Response Workforce of Ukraine (CERT-UA) in early April 2025 in reference to a marketing campaign concentrating on navy entities, legislation enforcement businesses, and native self-government our bodies.
The exercise, attributed to a hacking group it tracks as UAC-0226, entails the usage of phishing emails containing macro-laced Microsoft Excel paperwork that act as a conduit to deploy GIFTEDCROOK.
An info stealer at its core, the malware is designed to steal cookies, searching historical past, and authentication knowledge from fashionable net browsers reminiscent of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox.
Arctic Wolf’s evaluation of the artifacts has revealed that the stealer began off as a demo in February 2025, earlier than gaining new options with variations 1.2 and 1.3.
These new iterations embrace the power to reap paperwork and recordsdata under 7 MB in dimension, particularly searching for recordsdata created or modified throughout the final 45 days. The malware particularly searches for the next extensions: .doc, .docx, .rtf, .pptx, .ppt, .csv, .xls, .xlsx, .jpeg, .jpg, .png, .pdf, .odt, .ods, .rar, .zip, .eml, .txt, .sqlite, and .ovpn.
The e-mail campaigns leverage military-themed PDF lures to entice customers into clicking on a Mega cloud storage hyperlink that hosts a macro-enabled Excel workbook (“Список оповіщених військовозобов’язаних організації 609528.xlsm”), inflicting GIFTEDCROOK to be downloaded when the recipient activates macros. Many customers do not understand how widespread macro-enabled Excel recordsdata are in phishing assaults. They slip previous defenses as a result of individuals typically count on spreadsheets in work emails—particularly ones that look official or government-related.
The captured info is bundled right into a ZIP archive and exfiltrated to an attacker-controlled Telegram channel. If the whole archive dimension exceeds 20 MB, it’s damaged down into a number of elements. By sending stolen ZIP archives in small chunks, GIFTEDCROOK avoids detection and skips round conventional community filters. Within the closing stage, a batch script is executed to erase traces of the stealer from the compromised host.
This is not nearly stealing passwords or monitoring on-line habits—it is focused cyber espionage. The malware’s new means to sift via latest recordsdata and seize paperwork like PDFs, spreadsheets, and even VPN configs factors to an even bigger purpose: gathering intelligence. For anybody working in public sector roles or dealing with delicate inside experiences, this sort of doc stealer poses an actual threat—not simply to the person, however to the whole community they’re linked to.
“The timing of the campaigns mentioned on this report demonstrates clear alignment with geopolitical occasions, notably the latest negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul,” Arctic Wolf stated.
“The development from easy credential theft in GIFTEDCROOK model 1, to complete doc and knowledge exfiltration in variations 1.2 and 1.3, displays coordinated improvement efforts the place malware capabilities adopted geopolitical aims to reinforce knowledge assortment from compromised programs in Ukraine.”
