The United States prosecutors office released a report on the criminal charges they will be filing against five alleged members of Scattered Spider, a loose-knit community of hackers suspected of breaking into dozens of companies to steal confidential information and cryptocurrency.
Martin Estrada, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, said last 20 November that the defendants conducted phishing attacks by sending bogus but real-looking mass text messages to employees' mobile phones warning that their accounts would be deactivated.
The hackers, in their teens or 20s at the time, allegedly directed employees to links for entering log-in information, enabling the hackers to steal from their employers and millions of dollars of cryptocurrency from individuals' accounts.
Victims allegedly included at least 12 companies in the gaming, outsourcing, telecommunications and cryptocurrency fields, plus hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Estrada's office confirmed that the case concerned Scattered Spider. No victims were identified by name.
Security experts and officials have said Scattered Spider is composed of small clusters of people, including youngsters, who collaborate on-and-off on specific jobs.
The group has been blamed for unusually aggressive cybercrime sprees, targeting major multinational companies as well as individual cryptocurrency investors.
Some experts previously complained about law enforcement's apparent inability to crack down even though the identities of some suspects, including several living in Western countries, were known, industry insiders told Reuters last year.
That may now be changing.
"The days of easy money and no consequences are over," said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at cybersecurity company Unit 221B. "Defenders and law enforcement are meeting this wave of cybercrime aggressively now. Young people that have fallen into online crime culture need to exit before they become the next target."
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