Head Mare
- Primary motivation
- ideology
- Sophistication
- intermediate
- Resource level
- team
- Actor type
- hacktivist
- Profile updated
- 2026-07-07 12:15:20
Targeted industries: government-and-public-sector
Targeted regions: country_code:ru country_code:by
Context
Head Mare is a hacktivism focussed threat actor group known for targeting Russia and Belarus sectors using a remote access malware called PhantomRAT. They have been observed executing malicious code through specially crafted RAR archives, different from previous attacks exploiting vulnerabilities. The attribution of their campaign to Ukraine is uncertain due to limited visibility inside Russian networks. PhantomCore's use of RAR archives in their attack chain has been previously observed in other threat actor groups like Forest Blizzard.
Reports & references
- therecord.media — Russian Researchers Winrar Bug Ukraine Espionage (report)
- facct.ru — Phantomdl Loader (report)
- Kaspersky — 113555 (report)
- cyble.com — Head Mare Deploys Phantomcore Against Russia (report)