A Group of Young Cybercriminals Poses the ‘Most Imminent Threat’ of Cyberattacks Right Now

Empty grocery store shelves and grounded planes tend to signal a crisis, whether it’s an extreme weather event, public health crisis, or geopolitical emergency. But these scenes of chaos in recent weeks in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada were caused instead by financially motivated cyberattacks—seemingly perpetrated by a collective of joyriding teens.

A notorious cybercriminal group often called Scattered Spider is known for using social engineering techniques to infiltrate target companies by tricking IT help desk workers into granting them system access. Researchers say that the group seems to gain expertise about the backend systems commonly used by businesses in a particular industry and then uses this knowledge to hit a cluster of targets before moving on to another sector. The group often deploys ransomware or conducts data extortion attacks once it has compromised its victims.

Amid increasing pressure from law enforcement last year, which culminated in charges and arrests of five suspects allegedly linked to Scattered Spider, researchers say that the group was less active in 2024 and seemed to be attempting to lay low. The group’s escalating attacks in recent weeks, though, have shown that, far from being defeated, Scattered Spider is emboldened once again.

“There are some uniquely skilled actors in Scattered Spider when it comes to social engineering, and they have identified a major gap in our security systems that they’re successfully taking advantage of,” says John Hultquist, chief analyst in Google’s threat intelligence group. “This group is carrying out serious attacks on our critical infrastructure, and I hope that we’re not missing the opportunity to address the most imminent threat.”

Though a number of incidents have not been publicly attributed, an overwhelming spree of recent attacks on UK grocery store chains, North American insurers, and international airlines has broadly been tied to Scattered Spider. In May, the UK’s National Crime Agency confirmed it was looking at Scattered Spider in connection to the attacks on British retailers. And the FBI warned in an alert on Friday that it has observed “the cybercriminal group Scattered Spider expanding its targeting to include the airline sector.” The warning came as North American airlines Westjet and Hawaii Airlines said they had been victims of cybercriminal hacks. On Wednesday, the Australian airline Qantas also said it had been hit with a cyberattack, though it was not immediately clear if this attack was part of the group’s campaign.

“They slowed down, and we saw them dissipate for a while throughout 2024,” says Adam Meyers, a senior vice president for counter-adversary operations at the security company CrowdStrike. “Then they’ve roared back in the last couple of months, first hitting retail and then hitting insurance companies and most recently targeting airlines.”

Scattered Spider first emerged as a high-profile group toward the end of 2023 as its members moved from SIM swapping attacks to launching crippling ransomware attacks on Caesar’s Entertainment and MGM Resorts. The latter cost MGM around $100 million to recover from. Researchers emphasize that the collective is financially motivated, made up of mostly English-speaking teenagers and young men who are often based in the US or UK. The Scattered Spider hackers are considered an offshoot of the Com, an amorphous network of potentially thousands of trolls and criminals, many of whom engage in harassment, extortion, and child exploitation.

Scattered Spider members have increasingly coalesced around a tactic of using targeted social engineering to get a foothold inside company networks. Attackers may impersonate a staff member who is locked out of their company email account and contact the firm’s IT help desk to get access, before resetting multifactor authentication credentials. Researchers say that the group has also used a tactic of creating convincing phishing websites where the URLs often include the name of the target organization along with words like “okta,” “vpn” or “helpdesk.” Once inside networks, the hackers deploy various types of ransomware or steal data that is used to extort companies.

Meyers says Crowdstrike believes that Scattered Spider has roughly four core members, which drive the targeting of potential victims and “leverage” resources from the wider Com ecosystem as needed. The exact structure and size of Scattered Spider is unclear, but researchers agree that the group relies on an array of third-party services to carry out its attacks.

“Deterrence is extremely difficult because we’re essentially fighting a marketplace where a lot of the actors are replaceable,” Google’s Hultquist says. “For instance, Scattered Spider has worked with multiple ransomware services, so if one goes down there’s always someone to replace them.”

Aiden Sinnott, a senior threat researcher at cybersecurity company Sophos’ Counter Threat Unit, says that Scattered Spider and the Com more broadly are connected through relationships and communities on Discord servers or Telegram groups. “It’s this kind of evolving group where maybe new younger threat actors are coming in,” Sinnott says. “You can see this natural escalation progression as they learn skills of each other, and they're very big on sharing their wins as well.”

Some Scattered Spider members may target big-name companies, while others are involved in less high-profile activity. “There are groups, or individuals, who are really focused on hacking Coinbase accounts and stealing crypto and things like that,” Sinnott says. “So they’re not even focused on these big corporate organizations.”

As Hultquist puts it, "the activity is extremely resilient, because instead of fighting a single actor, we’re really fighting a marketplace.”