A Central Asia-focused espionage cluster known as Silent Lynx used a self-hosted AI agent to automate reconnaissance, collect government documents and clean up traces across intrusions into government and critical infrastructure networks, according to a November 11 investigation by CloudSEK. Reuters separately reported that the exposed server contained more than 2,000 national-security-related documents taken from Tajikistan’s government document system.
CloudSEK said it found an unauthenticated server that exposed the operator’s tools, stolen data, credentials and AI-agent workspace. The company attributed the server to Silent Lynx with high confidence based on code markers and build paths matching previously published malware samples. It assessed a Kazakhstan nexus with medium confidence, citing Russian-language operations and test traffic from a residential Kazakhtelecom connection.
The operator had domain-level access to Tajikistan’s national railway network from mid-August to at least October 10, 2026. CloudSEK said the operator used credentials belonging to a railway employee with a standard user role to access the country’s electronic document management platform. Weak per-document authorization checks allowed the account to retrieve more than 2,000 unique documents, including defence correspondence and records linked to the National Guard and State Committee for National Security.
CloudSEK said the operator used Hermes, an open-source autonomous-agent framework, for reconnaissance, document collection and log cleanup. Its configuration routed most model calls through OpenRouter to DeepSeek models, and the agent had destructive commands pre-approved. The use of AI agents for reconnaissance and collection also appears in the PaperCut server campaign previously reported by Abijita, although the actors and targets were different.
The same exposed server showed a separate intrusion into Uzbekistan’s Smart Forestry geospatial platform, where the operator achieved host-level command execution through a webshell and database access, but did not obtain root privileges. CloudSEK also found phishing lures impersonating Turkmenistan Railways and a regional administration that it said pointed to possible future targeting.
CloudSEK said the collection priorities across transport, defence and resource ministries pointed to regional intelligence gathering rather than financial theft. The exposed directory held more than a dozen gigabytes across hundreds of thousands of files. Reuters reported that Tajik and Kazakh officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment and that it could not reach Silent Lynx.
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