A prolific cybercriminal group that calls itself “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” has dominated headlines this year by regularly stealing data from and publicly mass extorting dozens of major corporations. But the tables seem to have turned somewhat for “Rey,” the moniker chosen by the technical operator and public face of the hacker group: Earlier this week, Rey confirmed his real life identity and agreed to an interview after KrebsOnSecurity tracked him down and contacted his father.

Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLSH) is thought to be an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters. Members of these gangs hail from many of the same chat channels on the Com, a mostly English-language cybercriminal community that operates across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

In May 2025, SLSH members launched a social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal. The group later launched a data leak portal that threatened to publish the internal data of three dozen companies that allegedly had Salesforce data stolen, including Toyota, FedEx, Disney/Hulu, and UPS.

Last week, the SLSH Telegram channel featured an offer to recruit and reward “insiders,” employees at large companies who agree to share internal access to their employer’s network for a share of whatever ransom payment is ultimately paid by the victim company.

SLSH has solicited insider access previously, but their latest call for disgruntled employees started making the rounds on social media at the same time news broke that the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike had fired an employee for allegedly sharing screenshots of internal systems with the hacker group (Crowdstrike said their systems were never compromised and that it has turned the matter over to law enforcement agencies).

Members of SLSH have traditionally used other ransomware gangs’ encryptors in attacks, including malware from ransomware affiliate programs like ALPHV/BlackCat, Qilin, RansomHub, and DragonForce. But last week, SLSH announced on its Telegram channel the release of their own ransomware-as-a-service operation called ShinySp1d3r.

The individual responsible for releasing the ShinySp1d3r ransomware offering is a core SLSH member who goes by the handle “Rey” and who is currently one of just three administrators of the SLSH Telegram channel. Previously, Rey was an administrator of the data leak website for Hellcat, a ransomware group that surfaced in late 2024 and was involved in attacks on companies including Schneider Electric, Telefonica, and Orange Romania.

Also in 2024, Rey would take over as administrator of the most recent incarnation of BreachForums, an English-language cybercrime forum whose domain names have been seized on multiple occasions by the FBI and/or by international authorities. In April 2025, Rey posted on Twitter/X about another FBI seizure of BreachForums.

On October 5, 2025, the FBI announced it had once again seized the domains associated with BreachForums, which it described as a major criminal marketplace used by ShinyHunters and others to traffic in stolen data and facilitate extortion.

“This takedown removes access to a key hub used by these actors to monetize intrusions, recruit collaborators, and target victims across multiple sectors,” the FBI said.

Incredibly, Rey would make a series of critical operational security mistakes last year that provided multiple avenues to ascertain and confirm his real-life identity and location. Read on to learn how it all unraveled for Rey.

WHO IS REY?

According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, Rey was an active user on various BreachForums reincarnations over the past two years, authoring more than 200 posts between February 2024 and July 2025. Intel 471 says Rey previously used the handle “Hikki-Chan” on BreachForums, where their first post shared data allegedly stolen from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In that February 2024 post about the CDC, Hikki-Chan says they could be reached at the Telegram username @wristmug. In May 2024, @wristmug posted in a Telegram group chat called “Pantifan” a copy of an extortion email they said they received that included their email address and password.

The message that @wristmug cut and pasted appears to have been part of an automated email scam that claims it was sent by a hacker who has compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. These missives threaten to release the video to all your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom, and they typically reference a real password the recipient has used previously.

“Noooooo,” the @wristmug account wrote in mock horror after posting a screenshot of the scam message. “I must be done guys.”

In posting their screenshot, @wristmug redacted the username portion of the email address referenced in the body of the scam message. However, they did not redact their previously-used password, and they left the domain portion of their email address (@proton.me) visible in the screenshot.

O5TDEV

Searching on @wristmug’s rather unique 15-character password in the breach tracking service Spycloud finds it is known to have been used by just one email address: cybero5tdev@proton.me. According to Spycloud, those credentials were exposed at least twice in early 2024 when this user’s device was infected with an infostealer trojan that siphoned all of its stored usernames, passwords and authentication cookies (a finding that was initially revealed in March 2025 by the cyber intelligence firm KELA).

Intel 471 shows the email address cybero5tdev@proton.me belonged to a BreachForums member who went by the username o5tdev. Searching on this nickname in Google brings up at least two website defacement archives showing that a user named o5tdev was previously involved in defacing sites with pro-Palestinian messages. The screenshot below, for example, shows that 05tdev was part of a group called Cyb3r Drag0nz Team.

A 2023 report from SentinelOne described Cyb3r Drag0nz Team as a hacktivist group with a history of launching DDoS attacks and cyber defacements as well as engaging in data leak activity.

“Cyb3r Drag0nz Team claims to have leaked data on over a million of Israeli citizens spread across multiple leaks,” SentinelOne reported. “To date, the group has released multiple .RAR archives of purported personal information on citizens across Israel.”

The cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint finds the Telegram user @05tdev was active in 2023 and early 2024, posting in Arabic on anti-Israel channels like “Ghost of Palestine” [full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this blog].

‘I’M A GINTY’

Flashpoint shows that Rey’s Telegram account (ID7047194296) was particularly active in a cybercrime-focused channel called Jacuzzi, where this user shared several personal details, including that their father was an airline pilot. Rey claimed in 2024 to be 15 years old, and to have family connections to Ireland.

Specifically, Rey mentioned in several Telegram chats that he had Irish heritage, even posting a graphic that shows the prevalence of the surname “Ginty.”

Spycloud indexed hundreds of credentials stolen from cybero5dev@proton.me, and those details indicate that Rey’s computer is a shared Microsoft Windows device located in Amman, Jordan. The credential data stolen from Rey in early 2024 show there are multiple users of the infected PC, but that all shared the same last name of Khader and an address in Amman, Jordan.

The “autofill” data lifted from Rey’s family PC contains an entry for a 46-year-old Zaid Khader that says his mother’s maiden name was Ginty. The infostealer data also shows Zaid Khader frequently accessed internal websites for employees of Royal Jordanian Airlines.

MEET SAIF

The infostealer data makes clear that Rey’s full name is Saif Al-Din Khader. Having no luck contacting Saif directly, KrebsOnSecurity sent an email to his father Zaid. The message invited the father to respond via email, phone or Signal, explaining that his son appeared to be deeply enmeshed in a serious cybercrime conspiracy.

Less than two hours later, I received a Signal message from Saif, who said his dad suspected the email was a scam and had forwarded it to him.

“I saw your email, unfortunately I don’t think my dad would respond to this because they think its some ‘scam email,'” said Saif, who told me he turns 16 years old next month. “So I decided to talk to you directly.”

Saif explained that he’d already heard from European law enforcement officials, and had been trying to extricate himself from SLSH. When asked why then he was involved in releasing SLSH’s new ShinySp1d3r ransomware-as-a-service offering, Saif said he couldn’t just suddenly quit the group.

“Well I cant just dip like that, I’m trying to clean up everything I’m associated with and move on,” he said.

He also shared that ShinySp1d3r is just a rehash of Hellcat ransomware, except modified with AI tools. “I gave the source code of Hellcat ransomware out basically.”

Saif claims he reached out on his own recently to the Telegram account for Operation Endgame, the codename for an ongoing law enforcement operation targeting cybercrime services, vendors and their customers.

“I’m already cooperating with law enforcement,” Saif said. “In fact, I have been talking to them since at least June. I have told them nearly everything. I haven’t really done anything like breaching into a corp or extortion related since September.”

Saif suggested that a story about him right now could endanger any further cooperation he may be able to provide. He also said he wasn’t sure if the U.S. or European authorities had been in contact with the Jordanian government about his involvement with the hacking group.

“A story would bring so much unwanted heat and would make things very difficult if I’m going to cooperate,” Saif said. “I’m unsure whats going to happen they said they’re in contact with multiple countries regarding my request but its been like an entire week and I got no updates from them.”

Saif shared a screenshot that indicated he’d contacted Europol authorities late last month. But he couldn’t name any law enforcement officials he said were responding to his inquiries, and KrebsOnSecurity was unable to verify his claims.

“I don’t really care I just want to move on from all this stuff even if its going to be prison time or whatever they gonna say,” Saif said.

Two alleged members of the Scattered Spider threat group pled not guilty today to charges related to a cyberattack on Transport for London in August 2024. Thalha Jubair, 19, of east London, and Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall in the West Midlands, were arrested in the UK in September. They appeared before Southwark Crown Court today and entered not guilty pleas to charges of conspiring to commit unauthorized acts against computer systems belonging to Transport for London (TfL), according to news reports. Sky News reported that the two “stood in the dock together and spoke only to confirm their names and enter not guilty pleas.” The charge states in part that the two are accused of "causing, or creating a significant risk of, serious damage to human welfare and intending to cause such damage or being reckless as to whether such damage was caused. Flowers is also accused of unauthorized acts against computer systems belonging to SSM Health, and attempting to commit unauthorized acts against computer systems belonging to Sutter Health. Jubair is also accused of failing to disclose the pin or passwords for devices seized from him in March 2025, and Jubair also faces substantial charges in the U.S. Both men continue to be held on remand, the BBC reported.

Scattered Spider Trial Date Set

A provisional trial date has been set for June 8, 2026, at Southwark Crown Court, with a pre-trial hearing scheduled for February 13. The cyberattack allegedly caused £39m of damage and disrupted TfL services for three months. While transport itself was unaffected, many TfL online services and information boards were knocked offline as part of the attack. Traffic cameras and "dial a ride" bookings were some of the affected services, and some payment systems were also affected. Personal data including names, emails and home addresses were accessed, and TfL was forced to inform thousands of customers that there may have been unauthorized access to personal information that may have included bank account numbers and sort codes.

Jubair Faces U.S. Charges Too

Jubair has also been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for conspiracies to commit computer fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in relation to at least 120 computer network intrusions and extortion involving 47 U.S. entities. The unsealed U.S. complaint alleged that Jubair’s victims paid at least $115 million in ransom payments. The U.S. claims Jubair could face up to 95 years in prison on the charges. Scattered Spider recently joined with ShinyHunters and LAPSUS$ to form the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters threat collective, which remains active, that Recent attacks by the group have targeted Salesforce data, including one involving the Gainsight customer success platform this week. Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters also claims to have been behind an insider attack at security vendor CrowdStrike, according to Bleeping Computer, although CrowdStrike says its systems and customer data were not affected by the incident.

The Salesloft Drift OAuth token breach compromised Salesforce data across hundreds of enterprises, including Cloudflare, Zscaler, and Palo Alto Networks. Learn how attackers exploited OAuth tokens, the risks of connected app misuse, and key steps to strengthen Salesforce and multi-cloud security.

The post Salesloft Drift Breaches: Your Complete Response Guide  appeared first on Security Boulevard.

U.S. prosecutors last week levied criminal hacking charges against 19-year-old U.K. national Thalha Jubair for allegedly being a core member of Scattered Spider, a prolific cybercrime group blamed for extorting at least $115 million in ransom payments from victims. The charges came as Jubair and an alleged co-conspirator appeared in a London court to face accusations of hacking into and extorting several large U.K. retailers, the London transit system, and healthcare providers in the United States.

At a court hearing last week, U.K. prosecutors laid out a litany of charges against Jubair and 18-year-old Owen Flowers, accusing the teens of involvement in an August 2024 cyberattack that crippled Transport for London, the entity responsible for the public transport network in the Greater London area.

On July 10, 2025, KrebsOnSecurity reported that Flowers and Jubair had been arrested in the United Kingdom in connection with recent Scattered Spider ransom attacks against the retailers Marks & Spencer and Harrods, and the British food retailer Co-op Group.

That story cited sources close to the investigation saying Flowers was the Scattered Spider member who anonymously gave interviews to the media in the days after the group’s September 2023 ransomware attacks disrupted operations at Las Vegas casinos operated by MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment.

The story also noted that Jubair’s alleged handles on cybercrime-focused Telegram channels had far lengthier rap sheets involving some of the more consequential and headline-grabbing data breaches over the past four years. What follows is an account of cybercrime activities that prosecutors have attributed to Jubair’s alleged hacker handles, as told by those accounts in posts to public Telegram channels that are closely monitored by multiple cyber intelligence firms.

EARLY DAYS (2021-2022)

Jubair is alleged to have been a core member of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group that broke into dozens of technology companies beginning in late 2021, stealing source code and other internal data from tech giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, Okta, Rockstar Games, Samsung, T-Mobile, and Uber.

That is, according to the former leader of the now-defunct LAPSUS$. In April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published internal chat records taken from a server that LAPSUS$ used, and those chats indicate Jubair was working with the group using the nicknames Amtrak and Asyntax. In the middle of the gang’s cybercrime spree, Asyntax told the LAPSUS$ leader not to share T-Mobile’s logo in images sent to the group because he’d been previously busted for SIM-swapping and his parents would suspect he was back at it again.

The leader of LAPSUS$ responded by gleefully posting Asyntax’s real name, phone number, and other hacker handles into a public chat room on Telegram:

That story about the leaked LAPSUS$ chats also connected Amtrak/Asyntax to several previous hacker identities, including “Everlynn,” who in April 2021 began offering a cybercriminal service that sold fraudulent “emergency data requests” targeting the major social media and email providers.

In these so-called “fake EDR” schemes, the hackers compromise email accounts tied to police departments and government agencies, and then send unauthorized demands for subscriber data (e.g. username, IP/email address), while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

EARTHTOSTAR

Prosecutors in New Jersey last week alleged Jubair was part of a threat group variously known as Scattered Spider, 0ktapus, and UNC3944, and that he used the nicknames EarthtoStar, Brad, Austin, and Austistic.

Beginning in 2022, EarthtoStar co-ran a bustling Telegram channel called Star Chat, which was home to a prolific SIM-swapping group that relentlessly used voice- and SMS-based phishing attacks to steal credentials from employees at the major wireless providers in the U.S. and U.K.

The group would then use that access to sell a SIM-swapping service that could redirect a target’s phone number to a device the attackers controlled, allowing them to intercept the victim’s phone calls and text messages (including one-time codes). Members of Star Chat targeted multiple wireless carriers with SIM-swapping attacks, but they focused mainly on phishing T-Mobile employees.

In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity scrutinized more than seven months of these SIM-swapping solicitations on Star Chat, which almost daily peppered the public channel with “Tmo up!” and “Tmo down!” notices indicating periods wherein the group claimed to have active access to T-Mobile’s network.

The data showed that Star Chat — along with two other SIM-swapping groups operating at the same time — collectively broke into T-Mobile over a hundred times in the last seven months of 2022. However, Star Chat was by far the most prolific of the three, responsible for at least 70 of those incidents.

A review of EarthtoStar’s messages on Star Chat as indexed by the threat intelligence firm Flashpoint shows this person also sold “AT&T email resets” and AT&T call forwarding services for up to $1,200 per line. EarthtoStar explained the purpose of this service in post on Telegram:

“Ok people are confused, so you know when u login to chase and it says ‘2fa required’ or whatever the fuck, well it gives you two options, SMS or Call. If you press call, and I forward the line to you then who do you think will get said call?”

New Jersey prosecutors allege Jubair also was involved in a mass SMS phishing campaign during the summer of 2022 that stole single sign-on credentials from employees at hundreds of companies. The text messages asked users to click a link and log in at a phishing page that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page, saying recipients needed to review pending changes to their upcoming work schedules.

The phishing websites used a Telegram instant message bot to forward any submitted credentials in real-time, allowing the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website.

That weeks-long SMS phishing campaign led to intrusions and data thefts at more than 130 organizations, including LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, Plex and Signal.

DA, COMRADE

EarthtoStar’s group Star Chat specialized in phishing their way into business process outsourcing (BPO) companies that provide customer support for a range of multinational companies, including a number of the world’s largest telecommunications providers. In May 2022, EarthtoStar posted to the Telegram channel “Frauwudchat”:

“Hi, I am looking for partners in order to exfiltrate data from large telecommunications companies/call centers/alike, I have major experience in this field, [including] a massive call center which houses 200,000+ employees where I have dumped all user credentials and gained access to the [domain controller] + obtained global administrator I also have experience with REST API’s and programming. I have extensive experience with VPN, Citrix, cisco anyconnect, social engineering + privilege escalation. If you have any Citrix/Cisco VPN or any other useful things please message me and lets work.”

At around the same time in the Summer of 2022, at least two different accounts tied to Star Chat — “RocketAce” and “Lopiu” — introduced the group’s services to denizens of the Russian-language cybercrime forum Exploit, including:

-SIM-swapping services targeting Verizon and T-Mobile customers;
-Dynamic phishing pages targeting customers of single sign-on providers like Okta;
-Malware development services;
-The sale of extended validation (EV) code signing certificates.

These two accounts on Exploit created multiple sales threads in which they claimed administrative access to U.S. telecommunications providers and asked other Exploit members for help in monetizing that access. In June 2022, RocketAce, which appears to have been just one of EarthtoStar’s many aliases, posted to Exploit:

Hello. I have access to a telecommunications company’s citrix and vpn. I would like someone to help me break out of the system and potentially attack the domain controller so all logins can be extracted we can discuss payment and things leave your telegram in the comments or private message me ! Looking for someone with knowledge in citrix/privilege escalation

On Nov. 15, 2022, EarthtoStar posted to their Star Sanctuary Telegram channel that they were hiring malware developers with a minimum of three years of experience and the ability to develop rootkits, backdoors and malware loaders.

“Optional: Endorsed by advanced APT Groups (e.g. Conti, Ryuk),” the ad concluded, referencing two of Russia’s most rapacious and destructive ransomware affiliate operations. “Part of a nation-state / ex-3l (3 letter-agency).”

2023-PRESENT DAY

The Telegram and Discord chat channels wherein Flowers and Jubair allegedly planned and executed their extortion attacks are part of a loose-knit network known as the Com, an English-speaking cybercrime community consisting mostly of individuals living in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Many of these Com chat servers have hundreds to thousands of members each, and some of the more interesting solicitations on these communities are job offers for in-person assignments and tasks that can be found if one searches for posts titled, “If you live near,” or “IRL job” — short for “in real life” job.

These “violence-as-a-service” solicitations typically involve “brickings,” where someone is hired to toss a brick through the window at a specified address. Other IRL jobs for hire include tire-stabbings, molotov cocktail hurlings, drive-by shootings, and even home invasions. The people targeted by these services are typically other criminals within the community, but it’s not unusual to see Com members asking others for help in harassing or intimidating security researchers and even the very law enforcement officers who are investigating their alleged crimes.

It remains unclear what precipitated this incident or what followed directly after, but on January 13, 2023, a Star Sanctuary account used by EarthtoStar solicited the home invasion of a sitting U.S. federal prosecutor from New York. That post included a photo of the prosecutor taken from the Justice Department’s website, along with the message:

“Need irl niggas, in home hostage shit no fucking pussies no skinny glock holding 100 pound niggas either”

Throughout late 2022 and early 2023, EarthtoStar’s alias “Brad” (a.k.a. “Brad_banned”) frequently advertised Star Chat’s malware development services, including custom malicious software designed to hide the attacker’s presence on a victim machine:

We can develop KERNEL malware which will achieve persistence for a long time,
bypass firewalls and have reverse shell access.

This shit is literally like STAGE 4 CANCER FOR COMPUTERS!!!

Kernel meaning the highest level of authority on a machine.
This can range to simple shells to Bootkits.

Bypass all major EDR’s (SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, etc)
Patch EDR’s scanning functionality so it’s rendered useless!

Once implanted, extremely difficult to remove (basically impossible to even find)
Development Experience of several years and in multiple APT Groups.

Be one step ahead of the game. Prices start from $5,000+. Message @brad_banned to get a quote

In September 2023 , both MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment suffered ransomware attacks at the hands of a Russian ransomware affiliate program known as ALPHV and BlackCat. Caesars reportedly paid a $15 million ransom in that incident.

Within hours of MGM publicly acknowledging the 2023 breach, members of Scattered Spider were claiming credit and telling reporters they’d broken in by social engineering a third-party IT vendor. At a hearing in London last week, U.K. prosecutors told the court Jubair was found in possession of more than $50 million in ill-gotten cryptocurrency, including funds that were linked to the Las Vegas casino hacks.

The Star Chat channel was finally banned by Telegram on March 9, 2025. But U.S. prosecutors say Jubair and fellow Scattered Spider members continued their hacking, phishing and extortion activities up until September 2025.

In April 2025, the Com was buzzing about the publication of “The Com Cast,” a lengthy screed detailing Jubair’s alleged cybercriminal activities and nicknames over the years. This account included photos and voice recordings allegedly of Jubair, and asserted that in his early days on the Com Jubair used the nicknames Clark and Miku (these are both aliases used by Everlynn in connection with their fake EDR services).

More recently, the anonymous Com Cast author(s) claimed, Jubair had used the nickname “Operator,” which corresponds to a Com member who ran an automated Telegram-based doxing service that pulled consumer records from hacked data broker accounts. That public outing came after Operator allegedly seized control over the Doxbin, a long-running and highly toxic community that is used to “dox” or post deeply personal information on people.

“Operator/Clark/Miku: A key member of the ransomware group Scattered Spider, which consists of a diverse mix of individuals involved in SIM swapping and phishing,” the Com Cast account stated. “The group is an amalgamation of several key organizations, including Infinity Recursion (owned by Operator), True Alcorians (owned by earth2star), and Lapsus, which have come together to form a single collective.”

The New Jersey complaint (PDF) alleges Jubair and other Scattered Spider members committed computer fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in relation to at least 120 computer network intrusions involving 47 U.S. entities between May 2022 and September 2025. The complaint alleges the group’s victims paid at least $115 million in ransom payments.

U.S. authorities say they traced some of those payments to Scattered Spider to an Internet server controlled by Jubair. The complaint states that a cryptocurrency wallet discovered on that server was used to purchase several gift cards, one of which was used at a food delivery company to send food to his apartment. Another gift card purchased with cryptocurrency from the same server was allegedly used to fund online gaming accounts under Jubair’s name. U.S. prosecutors said that when they seized that server they also seized $36 million in cryptocurrency.

The complaint also charges Jubair with involvement in a hacking incident in January 2025 against the U.S. courts system that targeted a U.S. magistrate judge overseeing a related Scattered Spider investigation. That other investigation appears to have been the prosecution of Noah Michael Urban, a 20-year-old Florida man charged in November 2024 by prosecutors in Los Angeles as one of five alleged Scattered Spider members.

Urban pleaded guilty in April 2025 to wire fraud and conspiracy charges, and in August he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Speaking with KrebsOnSecurity from jail after his sentencing, Urban asserted that the judge gave him more time than prosecutors requested because he was mad that Scattered Spider hacked his email account.

A court transcript (PDF) from a status hearing in February 2025 shows Urban was telling the truth about the hacking incident that happened while he was in federal custody. The judge told attorneys for both sides that a co-defendant in the California case was trying to find out about Mr. Urban’s activity in the Florida case, and that the hacker accessed the account by impersonating a judge over the phone and requesting a password reset.

Allison Nixon is chief research officer at the New York based security firm Unit 221B, and easily one of the world’s leading experts on Com-based cybercrime activity. Nixon said the core problem with legally prosecuting well-known cybercriminals from the Com has traditionally been that the top offenders tend to be under the age of 18, and thus difficult to charge under federal hacking statutes.

In the United States, prosecutors typically wait until an underage cybercrime suspect becomes an adult to charge them. But until that day comes, she said, Com actors often feel emboldened to continue committing — and very often bragging about — serious cybercrime offenses.

“Here we have a special category of Com offenders that effectively enjoy legal immunity,” Nixon told KrebsOnSecurity. “Most get recruited to Com groups when they are older, but of those that join very young, such as 12 or 13, they seem to be the most dangerous because at that age they have no grounding in reality and so much longevity before they exit their legal immunity.”

Nixon said U.K. authorities face the same challenge when they briefly detain and search the homes of underage Com suspects: Namely, the teen suspects simply go right back to their respective cliques in the Com and start robbing and hurting people again the minute they’re released.

Indeed, the U.K. court heard from prosecutors last week that both Scattered Spider suspects were detained and/or searched by local law enforcement on multiple occasions, only to return to the Com less than 24 hours after being released each time.

“What we see is these young Com members become vectors for perpetrators to commit enormously harmful acts and even child abuse,” Nixon said. “The members of this special category of people who enjoy legal immunity are meeting up with foreign nationals and conducting these sometimes heinous acts at their behest.”

Nixon said many of these individuals have few friends in real life because they spend virtually all of their waking hours on Com channels, and so their entire sense of identity, community and self-worth gets wrapped up in their involvement with these online gangs. She said if the law was such that prosecutors could treat these people commensurate with the amount of harm they cause society, that would probably clear up a lot of this problem.

“If law enforcement was allowed to keep them in jail, they would quit reoffending,” she said.

The Times of London reports that Flowers is facing three charges under the Computer Misuse Act: two of conspiracy to commit an unauthorized act in relation to a computer causing/creating risk of serious damage to human welfare/national security and one of attempting to commit the same act. Maximum sentences for these offenses can range from 14 years to life in prison, depending on the impact of the crime.

Jubair is reportedly facing two charges in the U.K.: One of conspiracy to commit an unauthorized act in relation to a computer causing/creating risk of serious damage to human welfare/national security and one of failing to comply with a section 49 notice to disclose the key to protected information.

In the United States, Jubair is charged with computer fraud conspiracy, two counts of computer fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, two counts of wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy. If extradited to the U.S., tried and convicted on all charges, he faces a maximum penalty of 95 years in prison.

In July 2025, the United Kingdom barred victims of hacking from paying ransoms to cybercriminal groups unless approved by officials. U.K. organizations that are considered part of critical infrastructure reportedly will face a complete ban, as will the entire public sector. U.K. victims of a hack are now required to notify officials to better inform policymakers on the scale of Britain’s ransomware problem.

For further reading (bless you), check out Bloomberg’s poignant story last week based on a year’s worth of jailhouse interviews with convicted Scattered Spider member Noah Urban.

The recent mass-theft of authentication tokens from Salesloft, whose AI chatbot is used by a broad swath of corporate America to convert customer interaction into Salesforce leads, has left many companies racing to invalidate the stolen credentials before hackers can exploit them. Now Google warns the breach goes far beyond access to Salesforce data, noting the hackers responsible also stole valid authentication tokens for hundreds of online services that customers can integrate with Salesloft, including Slack, Google Workspace, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI.

Salesloft disclosed on August 20 that, “Today, we detected a security issue in the Drift application,” referring to the technology that powers an AI chatbot used by so many corporate websites. The alert urged customers to re-authenticate the connection between the Drift and Salesforce apps to invalidate their existing authentication tokens, but it said nothing then to indicate those tokens had already been stolen.

On August 26, the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) warned that unidentified hackers tracked as UNC6395 used the access tokens stolen from Salesloft to siphon large amounts of data from numerous corporate Salesforce instances. Google said the data theft began as early as Aug. 8, 2025 and lasted through at least Aug. 18, 2025, and that the incident did not involve any vulnerability in the Salesforce platform.

Google said the attackers have been sifting through the massive data haul for credential materials such as AWS keys, VPN credentials, and credentials to the cloud storage provider Snowflake.

“If successful, the right credentials could allow them to further compromise victim and client environments, as well as pivot to the victim’s clients or partner environments,” the GTIG report stated.

The GTIG updated its advisory on August 28 to acknowledge the attackers used the stolen tokens to access email from “a very small number of Google Workspace accounts” that were specially configured to integrate with Salesloft. More importantly, it warned organizations to immediately invalidate all tokens stored in or connected to their Salesloft integrations — regardless of the third-party service in question.

“Given GTIG’s observations of data exfiltration associated with the campaign, organizations using Salesloft Drift to integrate with third-party platforms (including but not limited to Salesforce) should consider their data compromised and are urged to take immediate remediation steps,” Google advised.

On August 28, Salesforce blocked Drift from integrating with its platform, and with its productivity platforms Slack and Pardot.

The Salesloft incident comes on the heels of a broad social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal. That campaign led to data breaches and extortion attacks affecting a number of companies including Adidas, Allianz Life and Qantas.

On August 5, Google disclosed that one of its corporate Salesforce instances was compromised by the attackers, which the GTIG has dubbed UNC6040 (“UNC” stands for “uncategorized threat group”). Google said the extortionists consistently claimed to be the threat group ShinyHunters, and that the group appeared to be preparing to escalate its extortion attacks by launching a data leak site.

ShinyHunters is an amorphous threat group known for using social engineering to break into cloud platforms and third-party IT providers, and for posting dozens of stolen databases to cybercrime communities like the now-defunct Breachforums.

The ShinyHunters brand dates back to 2020, and the group has been credited with or taken responsibility for dozens of data leaks that exposed hundreds of millions of breached records. The group’s member roster is thought to be somewhat fluid, drawing mainly from active denizens of the Com, a mostly English-language cybercrime community scattered across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

Recorded Future’s Alan Liska told Bleeping Computer that the overlap in the “tools, techniques and procedures” used by ShinyHunters and the Scattered Spider extortion group likely indicate some crossover between the two groups.

To muddy the waters even further, on August 28 a Telegram channel that now has nearly 40,000 subscribers was launched under the intentionally confusing banner “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters 4.0,” wherein participants have repeatedly claimed responsibility for the Salesloft hack without actually sharing any details to prove their claims.

The Telegram group has been trying to attract media attention by threatening security researchers at Google and other firms. It also is using the channel’s sudden popularity to promote a new cybercrime forum called “Breachstars,” which they claim will soon host data stolen from victim companies who refuse to negotiate a ransom payment.

But Austin Larsen, a principal threat analyst at Google’s threat intelligence group, said there is no compelling evidence to attribute the Salesloft activity to ShinyHunters or to other known groups at this time.

“Their understanding of the incident seems to come from public reporting alone,” Larsen told KrebsOnSecurity, referring to the most active participants in the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters 4.0 Telegram channel.

Joshua Wright, a senior technical director at Counter Hack, is credited with coining the term “authorization sprawl” to describe one key reason that social engineering attacks from groups like Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters so often succeed: They abuse legitimate user access tokens to move seamlessly between on-premises and cloud systems.

Wright said this type of attack chain often goes undetected because the attacker sticks to the resources and access already allocated to the user.

“Instead of the conventional chain of initial access, privilege escalation and endpoint bypass, these threat actors are using centralized identity platforms that offer single sign-on (SSO) and integrated authentication and authorization schemes,” Wright wrote in a June 2025 column. “Rather than creating custom malware, attackers use the resources already available to them as authorized users.”

It remains unclear exactly how the attackers gained access to all Salesloft Drift authentication tokens. Salesloft announced on August 27 that it hired Mandiant, Google Cloud’s incident response division, to investigate the root cause(s).

“We are working with Salesloft Drift to investigate the root cause of what occurred and then it’ll be up to them to publish that,” Mandiant Consulting CTO Charles Carmakal told Cyberscoop. “There will be a lot more tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.”

A 20-year-old Florida man at the center of a prolific cybercrime group known as “Scattered Spider” was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison today, and ordered to pay roughly $13 million in restitution to victims.

Noah Michael Urban of Palm Coast, Fla. pleaded guilty in April 2025 to charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. Florida prosecutors alleged Urban conspired with others to steal at least $800,000 from five victims via SIM-swapping attacks that diverted their mobile phone calls and text messages to devices controlled by Urban and his co-conspirators.

Although prosecutors had asked for Urban to serve eight years, Jacksonville news outlet News4Jax.com reports the federal judge in the case today opted to sentence Urban to 120 months in federal prison, ordering him to pay $13 million in restitution and undergo three years of supervised release after his sentence is completed.

In November 2024 Urban was charged by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles as one of five members of Scattered Spider (a.k.a. “Oktapus,” “Scatter Swine” and “UNC3944”), which specialized in SMS and voice phishing attacks that tricked employees at victim companies into entering their credentials and one-time passcodes at phishing websites. Urban pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the California case, and the $13 million in restitution is intended to cover victims from both cases.

The targeted SMS scams spanned several months during the summer of 2022, asking employees to click a link and log in at a website that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Some SMS phishing messages told employees their VPN credentials were expiring and needed to be changed; other missives advised employees about changes to their upcoming work schedule.

That phishing spree netted Urban and others access to more than 130 companies, including Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, MailChimp, and Plex. The government says the group used that access to steal proprietary company data and customer information, and that members also phished people to steal millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

For many years, Urban’s online hacker aliases “King Bob” and “Sosa” were fixtures of the Com, a mostly Telegram and Discord-based community of English-speaking cybercriminals wherein hackers boast loudly about high-profile exploits and hacks that almost invariably begin with social engineering. King Bob constantly bragged on the Com about stealing unreleased rap music recordings from popular artists, presumably through SIM-swapping attacks. Many of those purloined tracks or “grails” he later sold or gave away on forums.

Sosa also was active in a particularly destructive group of accomplished criminal SIM-swappers known as “Star Fraud.” Cyberscoop’s AJ Vicens reported in 2023 that individuals within Star Fraud were likely involved in the high-profile Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts extortion attacks that same year.

The Star Fraud SIM-swapping group gained the ability to temporarily move targeted mobile numbers to devices they controlled by constantly phishing employees of the major mobile providers. In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published data taken from the Telegram channels for Star Fraud and two other SIM-swapping groups showing these crooks focused on SIM-swapping T-Mobile customers, and that they collectively claimed internal access to T-Mobile on 100 separate occasions over a 7-month period in 2022.

Reached via one of his King Bob accounts on Twitter/X, Urban called the sentence unjust, and said the judge in his case discounted his age as a factor.

“The judge purposefully ignored my age as a factor because of the fact another Scattered Spider member hacked him personally during the course of my case,” Urban said in reply to questions, noting that he was sending the messages from a Florida county jail. “He should have been removed as a judge much earlier on. But staying in county jail is torture.”

A court transcript (PDF) from a status hearing in February 2025 shows Urban was telling the truth about the hacking incident that happened while he was in federal custody. It involved an intrusion into a magistrate judge’s email account, where a copy of Urban’s sealed indictment was stolen. The judge told attorneys for both sides that a co-defendant in the California case was trying to find out about Mr. Urban’s activity in the Florida case.

“What it ultimately turned into a was a big faux pas,” Judge Harvey E. Schlesinger said. “The Court’s password…business is handled by an outside contractor. And somebody called the outside contractor representing Judge Toomey saying, ‘I need a password change.’ And they gave out the password change. That’s how whoever was making the phone call got into the court.”

Authorities in the United Kingdom this week arrested four people aged 17 to 20 in connection with recent data theft and extortion attacks against the retailers Marks & Spencer and Harrods, and the British food retailer Co-op Group. The breaches have been linked to a prolific but loosely-affiliated cybercrime group dubbed “Scattered Spider,” whose other recent victims include multiple airlines.

The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) declined verify the names of those arrested, saying only that they included two males aged 19, another aged 17, and 20-year-old female.

Scattered Spider is the name given to an English-speaking cybercrime group known for using social engineering tactics to break into companies and steal data for ransom, often impersonating employees or contractors to deceive IT help desks into granting access. The FBI warned last month that Scattered Spider had recently shifted to targeting companies in the retail and airline sectors.

KrebsOnSecurity has learned the identities of two of the suspects. Multiple sources close to the investigation said those arrested include Owen David Flowers, a U.K. man alleged to have been involved in the cyber intrusion and ransomware attack that shut down several MGM Casino properties in September 2023. Those same sources said the woman arrested is or recently was in a relationship with Flowers.

Sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Flowers, who allegedly went by the hacker handles “bo764,” “Holy,” and “Nazi,” was the group member who anonymously gave interviews to the media in the days after the MGM hack. His real name was omitted from a September 2024 story about the group because he was not yet charged in that incident.

The bigger fish arrested this week is 19-year-old Thalha Jubair, a U.K. man whose alleged exploits under various monikers have been well-documented in stories on this site. Jubair is believed to have used the nickname “Earth2Star,” which corresponds to a founding member of the cybercrime-focused Telegram channel “Star Fraud Chat.”

In 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published an investigation into the work of three different SIM-swapping groups that phished credentials from T-Mobile employees and used that access to offer a service whereby any T-Mobile phone number could be swapped to a new device. Star Chat was by far the most active and consequential of the three SIM-swapping groups, who collectively broke into T-Mobile’s network more than 100 times in the second half of 2022.

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Jubair also was a core member of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group that broke into dozens of technology companies in 2022, stealing source code and other internal data from tech giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, Okta, Rockstar Games, Samsung, T-Mobile, and Uber.

In April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published internal chat records from LAPSUS$, and those chats indicated Jubair was using the nicknames Amtrak and Asyntax. At one point in the chats, Amtrak told the LAPSUS$ group leader not to share T-Mobile’s logo in images sent to the group because he’d been previously busted for SIM-swapping and his parents would suspect he was back at it again.

As shown in those chats, the leader of LAPSUS$ eventually decided to betray Amtrak by posting his real name, phone number, and other hacker handles into a public chat room on Telegram.

That story about the leaked LAPSUS$ chats connected Amtrak/Asyntax/Jubair to the identity “Everlynn,” the founder of a cybercriminal service that sold fraudulent “emergency data requests” targeting the major social media and email providers. In such schemes, the hackers compromise email accounts tied to police departments and government agencies, and then send unauthorized demands for subscriber data while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

Sources say Jubair also used the nickname “Operator,” and that until recently he was the administrator of the Doxbin, a long-running and highly toxic online community that is used to “dox” or post deeply personal information on people. In May 2024, several popular cybercrime channels on Telegram ridiculed Operator after it was revealed that he’d staged his own kidnapping in a botched plan to throw off law enforcement investigators.

In November 2024, U.S. authorities charged five men aged 20 to 25 in connection with the Scattered Spider group, which has long relied on recruiting minors to carry out its most risky activities. Indeed, many of the group’s core members were recruited from online gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft in their early teens, and have been perfecting their social engineering tactics for years.

“There is a clear pattern that some of the most depraved threat actors first joined cybercrime gangs at an exceptionally young age,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at the New York based security firm Unit 221B. “Cybercriminals arrested at 15 or younger need serious intervention and monitoring to prevent a years long massive escalation.”

A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims.

Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world’s largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms.

As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity, Buchanan (a.k.a. “tylerb”) fled the United Kingdom in February 2023, after a rival cybercrime gang hired thugs to invade his home, assault his mother, and threaten to burn him with a blowtorch unless he gave up the keys to his cryptocurrency wallet. Buchanan was arrested in June 2024 at the airport in Palma de Mallorca while trying to board a flight to Italy. His extradition to the United States was first reported last week by Bloomberg.

Members of Scattered Spider have been tied to the 2023 ransomware attacks against MGM and Caesars casinos in Las Vegas, but it remains unclear whether Buchanan was implicated in that incident. The Justice Department’s complaint against Buchanan makes no mention of the 2023 ransomware attack.

Rather, the investigation into Buchanan appears to center on the SMS phishing campaigns from 2022, and on SIM-swapping attacks that siphoned funds from individual cryptocurrency investors. In a SIM-swapping attack, crooks transfer the target’s phone number to a device they control and intercept any text messages or phone calls to the victim’s device — including one-time passcodes for authentication and password reset links sent via SMS.

In August 2022, KrebsOnSecurity reviewed data harvested in a months-long cybercrime campaign by Scattered Spider involving countless SMS-based phishing attacks against employees at major corporations. The security firm Group-IB called them by a different name — 0ktapus, because the group typically spoofed the identity provider Okta in their phishing messages to employees at targeted firms.

The complaint against Buchanan (PDF) says the FBI tied him to the 2022 SMS phishing attacks after discovering the same username and email address was used to register numerous Okta-themed phishing domains seen in the campaign. The domain registrar NameCheap found that less than a month before the phishing spree, the account that registered those domains logged in from an Internet address in the U.K. FBI investigators said the Scottish police told them the address was leased to Buchanan from January 26, 2022 to November 7, 2022.

Authorities seized at least 20 digital devices when they raided Buchanan’s residence, and on one of those devices they found usernames and passwords for employees of three different companies targeted in the phishing campaign.

“The FBI’s investigation to date has gathered evidence showing that Buchanan and his co-conspirators targeted at least 45 companies in the United States and abroad, including Canada, India, and the United Kingdom,” the FBI complaint reads. “One of Buchanan’s devices contained a screenshot of Telegram messages between an account known to be used by Buchanan and other unidentified co-conspirators discussing dividing up the proceeds of SIM swapping.”

U.S. prosecutors allege that records obtained from Discord showed the same U.K. Internet address was used to operate a Discord account that specified a cryptocurrency wallet when asking another user to send funds. The complaint says the publicly available transaction history for that payment address shows approximately 391 bitcoin was transferred in and out of this address between October 2022 and
February 2023; 391 bitcoin is presently worth more than $26 million.

In November 2024, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles unsealed criminal charges against Buchanan and four other alleged Scattered Spider members, including Ahmed Elbadawy, 23, of College Station, Texas; Joel Evans, 25, of Jacksonville, North Carolina; Evans Osiebo, 20, of Dallas; and Noah Urban, 20, of Palm Coast, Florida. KrebsOnSecurity reported last year that another suspected Scattered Spider member — a 17-year-old from the United Kingdom — was arrested as part of a joint investigation with the FBI into the MGM hack.

Mr. Buchanan’s court-appointed attorney did not respond to a request for comment. The accused faces charges of wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to obtain information by computer for private financial gain, and aggravated identity theft. Convictions on the latter charge carry a minimum sentence of two years in prison.

Documents from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California indicate Buchanan is being held without bail pending trial. A preliminary hearing in the case is slated for May 6.