The Russian state-sponsored hacking group known as

Turla

has transformed its custom backdoor Kazuar into a modular peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet that's engineered for stealth and persistent access to compromised hosts.

Turla, per the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is assessed to be affiliated with Center 16 of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB)