Operation Talked: A Russia-Linked Cyber Espionage Campaign Targeting Ukraine’s Defense Industry

OPERATION TALKED is an active Russia-linked cyber-espionage campaign (June 2025–July 2026) that combined large-scale opportunistic exploitation (1.1M+ targets, 19+ CVEs) with hands-on intrusions into Ukrainian defense and aerospace contractors resulting in full Git repository theft; the operation was reconstructed after the actor exposed an unauthenticated C2 directory containing 8,436 files, and multiple Sliver C2 services and an interactive shell remained live at publication.