FBI, CISA warn of more Scattered Spider attacks to come

Date:
Wed, 30 Jul 2025 13:06:55 +0000

Description:
Infamous hacking collective Scattered Spider is evolving to grow even more dangerous.

FULL STORY

Scattered Spider is only getting warmed up with its cyberattacks, and businesses should be on their guard for possible attacks, law enforcement forces have said.

A warning given by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and a handful of other security agencies in Canada, the UK, and Australia, says the group has evolved to use more advanced social engineering
- mostly impersonating employees to trick IT help desks into resetting passwords and transferring MFA tokens to attacker-controlled devices.

The hackers have also added new malware such as RattyRAT for stealthy access and DragonForce ransomware to encrypt systems and demand payment - especially targeting VMware ESXi servers.

More to come

Also known as Okto Tempest (and a handful of other names), Scattered Spider
is described as a highly aggressive and sophisticated cybercriminal group
known for targeting major companies through social engineering, phishing, and identity-focused attacks.

The group is infamous for its use of SIM swapping, MFA fatigue attacks, and help desk impersonation to gain initial access, and its the latter that CISA
is now further stressing.

Scattered Spider is generally engaged in double-extortion attacks,
exfiltrating sensitive files to third-party servers before encrypting the target infrastructure. To store the stolen files, theyre using MEGA.nz and Amazon S3, and in some cases, theyve run thousands of queries against
Snowflake environments to steal large volumes of data quickly.

To stay hidden, they create fake identities backed by social media profiles, monitor internal communications like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and even join incident response calls to learn how defenders are reacting.

CISA says more Scattered Spider attacks are to be expected in the coming
weeks and months, and urges organizations to use phishing-resistant MFA (like FIDO/WebAuthn), audit and restrict remote access tools, monitor risky logins and unusual account behavior, maintain offline, encrypted backups, segment networks, and patch known vulnerabilities.

Via Cybernews

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/fbi-cisa-warn-of-more-scattered-spider- attacks-to-come

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