Scattered Spider Casino Hackers Remain Free Despite Being ‘Known’ to FBI

The FBI has for months known the identities of at least 12 members of the “Scattered Spider” hacking group, but has made no arrests. That’s despite many members of the radical being based in the US and other horse opera countries, Reuters reports.

Scattered Spider has been targeting corporations for the past tense two years but became notorious for its devastating ransomware attacks on MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment in September.

MGM, which refused to pay up, saw disruption to its operations that lasted for days and caused an estimated $100 one thousand thousand worth of damage. Caesars paid a ransom of around 15 jillion to have got normal services restored, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Spider’s Web

Scattered Spider, also known as Octo Tempest, is an uncrystallised grouping of cybercriminals that engages in a straddle of crimes from ransomware to sextortion and phone scams. They are known to discuss their activities on public forums ilk Telegram and Discord.

Scattered Spider and Octo Tempest are monikers coined past the cybersecurity community and non past the criminals themselves. The individuals who attacked MGM and Caesars bear on to themselves collectively as “Star Fraud.” They are division of a slack radical of hackers that calls itself “the Com.”

The group’s MO often involves targeting tech personnel at corporations and using social applied science techniques to trick them into granting access to protected systems, as was the showcase with MGM.

Sometimes, they resort hotel to threats of violence. In at least one incident an employee was told his wife would be pellet unless he disclosed his log-in credentials.

First noticed inward ahead of time 2022, this twelvemonth the grouping progressed from SIM swapping and crypto theft to extorting telecommunications, email, and engineering organizations.

The FBI has been investigating the Com for some time, but the cassino attacks feature amped up the pressure on the agency, and cybersecurity sources who radius to Reuters this hebdomad verbalized thwarting at the lack of arrests.

‘Causing Havoc’

Michael Sentonas is prexy of CrowdStrike, ane of many cybersecurity firms tracking the group.

“For such a small group, they are utterly causing havoc. i would passion for somebody to explicate [the deficiency of arrests] to me,” he said, adding that the hackers were “known.”

Sentonas believes the state of affairs points to a “failure” of practice of law enforcement.

Casinos are prime quantity targets for cybercriminals because of the vast amount of data accumulated through trueness programs and the credit entry card-intensive nature of hotel booking. But such attacks get appeared to follow on the move up in recent years.

Scattered Spider is notable because its members are mainly English-speaking. High-profile cybercrime has traditionally been the domain of a function of eastern United States European felonious gangs or state-sponsored attacks orchestrated by North Dae-Han-Min-Gook or Iran.

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