Ravie LakshmananJun 25, 2026Initial Access Broker / Ransomware
A new, stealthy backdoor named Mistic has been deployed as part of suspected financially motivated attacks aimed at multiple organizations spanning insurance, education, IT, and professional services sectors since April 2026.
According to Symantec and Carbon Black's Threat Hunter Team, the backdoor, also tracked as MLTBackdoor, is said to be linked to an initial access broker (IAB) named KongTuke (aka 404 TDS, Chaya_002, LandUpdate808, TAG-124, and Woodgnat), and dropped along with ModeloRAT, a Python remote access trojan (RAT) previously attributed to the group.
"The backdoor runs payloads in memory with no file written to disk and includes a kill switch that lets it delete itself, which are features consistent with an operator seeking long-term, low-visibility access," Broadcom's cybersecurity teams said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
ModeloRAT was first flagged by Huntress in January 2026 in connection with a variant of a ClickFix campaign dubbed CrashFix, in which the KongTuke actors used a malicious Google Chrome extension masquerading as an ad blocker to intentionally crash a victim's web browser and trick them into running arbitrary commands under the pretext of running a security scan.
