Zeba Siddiqui
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The U.S. FBI is working to charge hackers with the violent Scattered Spider crime group, which is mainly based in the United States and Western countries and has hacked dozens of American organizations, a senior official said.
Young hackers made headlines last year when they hacked into the systems of casino operators MGM Resorts (NYSE:) International and Caesars (NASDAQ:) Entertainment, locking down the companies’ systems and demanding large ransoms. From healthcare and telecommunications companies to financial services, they hacked a range of organizations over two years, putting pressure on law enforcement to stop them.
“We work to charge people where possible with criminal behavior, in this case primarily under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” Brett Leatherman, the FBI’s deputy director for cybersecurity affairs, told Reuters.
The group represents a rare alliance of hackers in Western countries with seasoned cybercriminals from Eastern Europe, he said on the sidelines of the RSA conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.
“Often we don’t see this kind of mixture of geographic hackers working together outside of, for example, hacktivism,” he said.
Security researchers have been tracking the Scattered Spider since at least 2022 and say the group is much more aggressive than other cybercriminal gangs and is particularly adept at intercepting the personal data of IT help desk employees to infiltrate company networks. Caesars paid about $15 million to free its systems from hackers.
In conversations with their victims, the group sometimes threatened physical harm, which alarmed some researchers.
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The gang’s activity appeared to be subsiding in January, but it is now becoming “pretty severe,” said Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer of Google’s Mandiant security unit, which has worked with several of the victims.
According to him, over two years the gang attacked more than 100 organizations, gaining a certain level of access to all of them, and regularly successfully scammed people.
Given the intensity of the attacks, some experts have criticized the lack of arrests, especially since they are based in Western countries.
Leatherman said private security firms helped the FBI gather evidence.
“This is an incredibly important group for us that we need to continue to look for opportunities to break through,” he said.
“We have a certain burden of proof that we must meet to conduct law enforcement operations. And we are moving in this direction as quickly as we can,” he said.
One arrest is known. In January, the FBI charged 19-year-old Noah Urban of Florida with wire fraud, which Leatherman said was linked to Scattered Spider.
More arrests may follow. Some of the gang members are minors, but the FBI can use state and local laws to bring them to justice, Leatherman said.
“Historically, it’s been very, very effective,” he said.