Kazakhstan-linked hackers stole thousands of national security documents from Tajikistan, a cybersecurity company has said.
The hacking group called Silent Lynx also accessed Uzbekistan’s forestry management platform and created phishing lures targeting Turkmenistan, Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Cloud Sek said in a report published Wednesday (11 November).
The hackers instructed AI agents to carry out the cyberattacks in Russian and operated during Kazakh business hours, sometimes from a residential Kazakh internet connection.
Kazakh and Tajik government officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. AnewZ has contacted the governments of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan for comment. Efforts to reach Silent Lynx were unsuccessful.
CloudSek said it caught the cyber spies after they inadvertently left a server exposed to the internet.
Data recovered by CloudSek showed the hackers broke into Tajikistan’s national railway network in mid-August and obtained administrator-level access. The hackers then logged into Tajikistan’s national electronic document management platform, using a railway employee’s credentials.
Access to the single account allowed the attackers to pull documents far outside the scope of the railway.
They stole thousands of documents addressed to Tajikistan’s Ministry of Defence. Among this paperwork were documents covering air-space use, flight-clearance requests, military attaché postings and foreign-liaison correspondence, budgets and air-defence cooperation.
A smaller tranche of documents marked for Tajikistan’s National Guard, the branch of the military responsible for public security, and the State Committee for National Security, which deals with counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence issues, were also pulled.
Hundreds of letters marked for Tajikistan’s State Investment Committee, which is responsible for national investment, were also taken.
Other Central Asian countries appear to have been targeted as well. Attackers exploited a vulnerability in Uzbekistan's Smart Forestry GeoServer to establish remote access.
Phishing lures impersonating Turkmenistan Railways and a Turkmen regional administration were built and tested in October 2026, CloudSek said.
Among the exposed data were instructions from the hackers to their AI agent and guidelines on how it should see itself, operate and communicate with the hackers running it.
“You are an elite offensive security specialist and red teamer,” the instructions stated.
A red teamer is a cybersecurity professional who simulates covert attacks to test an organisation's systems.
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