Introduction We continue tracking the activity of Toy Ghouls (also known as Bearlyfy, Laboo.boo, and Feral Wolf), a financially motivated group that has been targeting Russian organizations since 2025. The attackers initially relied exclusively on tools pulled from public GitHub repositories along with leaked Babuk and LockBit ransomware builders, later shifting to their own custom ransomware, GenieLocker . In early July 2026, we observed the group using a custom backdoor for the first time. We identified two versions of this backdoor: one uses the HiveMQ MQTT broker as its C2 server, while the other relies on the Element messenger. Both versions include “bird” in their names: mqtt-bird-agent 0.1.0 (HiveMQ version) matrix-bird-agent 0.1.0 (Element version) This post examines how the…