Operation ForumTroll (or ForumTroll) is a much more than it appears at first glance. Most people have never heard of it. The combination of cyber-espionage with a coordinated influence campaign has created an organization that focuses primarily on Eastern Europe. ForumTroll has been operating in the background for several years, but its operations have not received the attention that many other nation states have received for similar kinds of operations.
Yet, ForumTroll, through the same types of tactics as those employed by coordinated influence operations by other nation states, have utilized a combination of social engineering-based methods, forum infiltration methods, credential phishing methods, as well as malware, in order to build up a database on individuals and change the narratives in the online communities that they work in.
This report, consisting of a 1000-word intelligence report, will discuss the identity of ForumTroll, the reasons for its existence, its tools and tactics, its ongoing threat posture in 2025, and how it may continue to evolve. This report will be presented in a professional, threat intelligence styled report.
Introduction: A Hybrid Espionage and Information Operation
Operation Forum Troll is a hybrid form of both Espionage and Information Operations (IO). This operation has a long history of infiltrating online forums, social media sites, and community platforms that are frequented by researchers, activists, volunteers involved in defense activities, and many different types of civil society in Eastern Europe. Unlike many more technical (e.g., hacking) APTs, the Forum Troll operation effectively combines the human-centric nature of Tradecraft (TC) with a mid-tier level of Cyber Capability (CC), creating a very effective hybrid model for espionage and influence operations.
The overall objectives of Forum Troll are:
- To gather intelligence from online communities
- To identify participants engaged in political, military, and/or security-related activities
- To disseminate disinformation and create a false impression in the mind of the public
- To support follow on cyber operations via credential theft
The hybrid approach has allowed Forum Troll to become a persistent threat in the greater Cyber and Information Space.
Identity & Motivation
Forum Troll has been classified as a pro-Russian influence/espionage operation, mainly due to the targets of its exploitation, the language used by the actors, the physical location of the infrastructure, and the alignment with Regional Geopolitical Interests (RGI) of the Russian Federation.
While it cannot be given a direct correlation to a specific Nation-State Group (NSG), there are many indicators the Forum Troll operation is likely being coordinated with other Russian information operations.
Motivational Drivers
ForumTroll’s primary operations include:
– Disruption: ForumTroll collects intelligence on various activist groups, volunteer organisations, policy consultants and government-affiliated organisations.
– Misinformation: ForumTroll manipulates social media conversations relating to violence, political narratives and friendships between the United States and its allies.
– Credential Theft: ForumTroll gains access to the credentials of individuals in order to victimize them by illegally entering their private conversation groups, cloud storage and/or encrypted conversation applications.
– Network Structure: ForumTroll identifies key individuals and their relationships to others within the groups to carry out future projects.
ForumTroll has demonstrated an ongoing interest in adding to the digital landscape and building the digital capital of those connected to it, rather than physically targeting or destroying critical infrastructure.
TTPs: How ForumTroll Executes Its Campaigns
ForumTroll employs methods of personal interaction, deceit and sociomolecular penetration as the main vectors with additional opportunities to insert malware and infrastructure.
1. Initial Access: Forum & Social Network Infiltration
Inevitably, the first point of entry for ForumTroll into communities is through infiltrating online forums and social networks posing as:
– Activists
– Volunteers
– Analysists
– Researchers
– Concerned citizens
Once integrated, ForumTroll enters communications, sends direct messages and tries to create a sense of familiarity before attempting to collect:
– Sensitive information
– Identify potential targets (from within the membership) and weaknesses (within the structural infrastructure) of the group.
– Send malicious links or attachments to individuals within the group in order to compromise their security.
– Gather data about membership and seniority through dialogue.
ForumTroll’s most useful asset remains the “creation of personas”.
2. Phishing & Credential Theft
The group uses:
– Fake login pages
– Email & messaging app sign-in pages faked
– Private messages that claim to “verify” an identity (social engineering)
These techniques are typically used in coordination with forum events such as moderator elections, group reorganizations, or current events in politics.
3. Malware Deployment: Lightweight but Targeted
ForumTroll uses the following types of malware:
– Small backdoors
– Reconnaissance scripts
– Token stealers for cloud services
– Document collectors that focus on chat logs, PDFs and spreadsheets
Malware is typically installed on victims’ devices after establishing a trusting relationship.
4. Information Operations & Narrative Manipulation
ForumTroll works by:
– Coordinating groups of troll accounts to promote certain narratives
– Amplifying divisive topics
– Posting disinformation to high-profile threads
– Harassing influential people
The group’s messaging is often designed to mimic or echo the narratives being put out by pro-Russian state-sponsored media organizations.
5. C2 Infrastructure: Blended and Disposable
ForumTroll operates through:
– Using shared hosting providers
– Using temporary cloud services to host servers
– Using dynamic DNS domain names
– Using encrypted communications
The group’s C2 infrastructure is designed to be ephemeral, so the ability to identify them is further complicated as it allows for a rapid turnover of infrastructure.
Target Profile
ForumTroll has been targeting mainly the following three broad categories of people:
1.Political activists
2.Defense volunteers and civil-support organizations
3.Policy researchers and Think-Tank Staff
4.Journalists Covering Regional Security Issues
5.Government Adjacent Communities/Online Groups
ForumTroll’s activity is very much social graph-centric, rather than network-centric; the focus of ForumTroll’s operations isn’t on Google/Facebook/LinkedIn/Snapchat or comparable platforms; but rather, ForumTroll operates primarily through compromise of people and the flow of information.
Notable Operations
Although the majority of ForumTroll’s operations are executed quietly (without media attention), some of its operations do generate a fair amount of exposure; there have also been several high-profile incidents that highlight the tactics used by the group, including:
2020–2021: Expansion into Activist Circles
ForumTroll continued to scale its infiltrational activities targeting activist groups throughout Eastern Europe and created a network of multiple personas for their campaigns.
2022: Escalation Linked to Regional Conflict
At the time of geopolitical volatility in the region, ForumTroll ramped up its activity with a number of disinformation campaigns in support of its agenda on topics related to regional security and constructed a series of attacks against the moderators of high-traffic online discussion boards.
2023: Credential Harvesting Campaign Against Volunteer Networks
ForumTroll targeted the online volunteer logistics networks supporting the defense operations and attempted to gain access to:
– private communication channels
– identity information
– coordination plans
2024: Coordinated Forum‑Centric Influence Operations
A new group of personas was introduced into the political communities with narratives aimed at undermining Western support for Ukraine.
2025: Information Collection and Cloud‑Account Compromise
ForumTroll shifted toward:
– acquisition of cloud tokens
– collection of data on how non-government organizations coordinate their activities
– mapping the communication patterns of government-adjacent entities.
Recent Developments: Increasing Technical and Operational Sophistication
The indicators from late 2024 to early 2025 represent an increase in the technical/operational sophistication of ForumTroll, including the following characteristics:
– More developed online personas built to include longer durations of sustainable user engagement
– Use of cloud-based phishing kits as a primary source of phishing activity
– A more effective method of malware obfuscation and modularity
– The development of better multilingual blending techniques across the many online communities involved in espionage
Thus, as the phrase “operational tradecraft” refers to the tactics and methods employed by actors to execute their operations, we would extend this definition to mean that ForumTroll has developed tradecraft similar to the tactics used by professional IO cells.
Conclusion: A Persistent and Adaptable Influence‑Espionage Threat
Operation ForumTroll represents a distinct type of APT that exists within the modern-day APT landscape. While traditional APT groups like APT38 primarily exploit vulnerabilities through traditional CE and destructive capabilities, Operation ForumTroll has created a distinct and unique form of social infiltration, with techniques that exploit conversational deceptions and targeted person-to-person espionage, which leverage the human attack surface as the primary means of entry into a target.
Defensive Recommendations
Based on the current threat landscape for ForumTroll, the following recommendations should be adhered to by organizations who may be targeted by this threat:
– Increase community moderation controls within your community
– Implement MFA across all platforms
– Monitor and track any impersonation attempts and created long-term persona relationships
– Train employees to recognize socially engineered trust relationships
– Perform audits of all cloud account tokens for any unauthorized use
As we enter 2025, it is clear that actors in the influence and espionage space can still make a significant impact on targeted organizations, regardless of their size. With proper training and understanding of the techniques and tactics that are utilized, they can effectively exploit people and their unique interaction with conversations and online network platforms.
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