A hacking group tracked as Silent Lynx used Hermes, an open-source autonomous AI agent, to help spy on Central Asian governments, according to a report CloudSEK published Wednesday. The Singapore-based security firm uncovered the operation after finding an exposed Silent Lynx server holding more than a dozen gigabytes of data, including stolen government documents, hacking tools and records of the agent's activity.
The server was a Debian virtual machine left open without authentication on port 8088. It held hundreds of thousands of files, with directory activity running from April to October 2026, and CloudSEK said it has high confidence the directory belongs to a Silent Lynx operator.
The Hermes install was custom-branded as "Strix" and given a persona describing it as an elite offensive security specialist and red teamer. Its primary model was DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, accessed through OpenRouter, with Gemini 2.5 Flash handling sub-agents. The agent was configured to run destructive commands without asking for confirmation, and its tool-loop hard stop was disabled.
Key facts
- 01CloudSEK published its Silent Lynx report on November 11, 2026, after finding an unauthenticated server with more than a dozen gigabytes of data.
- 02The group ran Hermes, an open-source autonomous agent, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash as its primary model and Gemini 2.5 Flash for sub-agents.
- 03Operators held access to Tajikistan's national railway network from mid-August to at least October 10, 2026.
- 04CloudSEK counted more than 2,000 unique documents, mostly Tajik Ministry of Defence correspondence, taken from a government document platform.
- 05CloudSEK assessed a Kazakhstan nexus with medium confidence, based partly on test traffic from a residential Kazakh connection.
The operator used the agent for reconnaissance, data collection and erasing traces, and issued instructions in Russian through a Telegram bot, allowing remote control from a phone. CloudSEK said every inbound command came from a single Telegram account.
Tajikistan took the heaviest hit. Silent Lynx held domain-level access to the country's national railway network from mid-August to at least October 10, and used one railway employee's account to log into the government's electronic document management platform. From there, the group collected more than two thousand unique documents dated through 2026, mostly correspondence sent to or through the Ministry of Defence.
The haul also included smaller sets of files tied to the National Guard and the State Committee for National Security, hundreds of State Investment Committee letters, and a directory export covering more than a hundred government organizations and their employees. Some documents contained passport and national ID scans.
In Uzbekistan, the group gained command execution on a GeoServer host supporting the Smart Forestry initiative, using malicious WAR files, a webshell and PostgreSQL commands. CloudSEK said the operator did not obtain root access on that machine.
Turkmenistan may be next, according to CloudSEK. Researchers found lure files disguised as a Turkmenistan Railways ticket from Ashgabat to Turkmenabat and an Ahal regional administration report, built and tested in October, which CloudSEK said points to an upcoming campaign. The researchers did not establish whether those attacks succeeded.
The toolkit combined the Laplas and Chvost implant families with a previously unreported generation of service-installer implants and an AMSI-bypass delivery variant. The infection chain ran from an LNK shortcut and decoy PDF to hidden PowerShell and a raw TCP shell.
CloudSEK assessed with medium confidence that Silent Lynx has ties to Kazakhstan, citing Russian-language communications, the operator's own test traffic from a residential Kazakh connection, and working hours of 08:00 to 20:00 UTC+5 on weekdays. The report does not establish any link to the Kazakh government.
Silent Lynx, also tracked as Cavalry Werewolf and YoroTrooper, has previously been linked to espionage campaigns targeting Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Belarus and Russia. In October 2025, it launched a months-long campaign against Russian government agencies and industrial firms using phishing emails disguised as Kyrgyz government correspondence.
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