British law enforcement officers have arrested a 17-year-old boy from Walsall, who is suspected of being a member of a notorious Scattered spider cybercriminal syndicate.
The arrest was made “in connection with a global online cyber crime ring targeting large organizations with ransomware and accessing computer networks”, West Midlands Police said. said. “The arrest is part of a global investigation into a large-scale cyber hacking community that has targeted a number of major companies, including MGM Resorts in America.”
Detention of the teenager, carried out in the village coordination with the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), comes just over a month after another 22 year member A member of a British cybercrime syndicate has been detained in Spain.
Scattered Spider, an offshoot of a loosely knit group called The Com, has evolved into an original access broker and affiliate, providing ransomware families like BlackCat, Qilin and RansomHub. A recent report from Google-owned Mandiant found that attackers are targeting non-encryption ransomware attacks that aim to steal data from software-as-a-service (SaaS).
The development comes as the Department of Justice announced that Scott Raul Esparza, 24, of Texas, was sentenced to nine months in prison for using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack called Astrostress between 2019 and 2022, after which he is expected to to serve two years under supervision. He pleaded guilty earlier in March.
“Astrostress.com customers were offered different subscription levels – depending on how many attacks they wanted and with what power – and charged accordingly,” the Justice Department said. said. “Thus, this site allowed conspirators around the world to create accounts on Astrostress.com and then use Astrostress.com resources to launch attacks on Internet-connected computers around the world.”
Esparza, who purchased the attack servers and maintained the service, is said to have worked with 21-year-old Shamar Shattuck from Florida. Shattuck faces up to five years in prison after pleading guilty in March 2023.
It also follows sanctions imposed by the US Treasury against Yulia Vladimirovna Pankratova and Denis Olegovich Degtyarenko, two members of the CyberArmyofRussia_Reborn (CARR), a a human hacktivist linked to the active Russian group Sandworm (aka APT44) for participating in cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure in the country.
Pankratova (aka Yulia) is believed to be the leader of CARR and its spokesperson, while Degtyarenko (aka Dena) works as the group’s top hacker and is allegedly responsible for hacking the control and data acquisition (SCADA) system of an unnamed US energy company.
“Using a variety of unsophisticated methods, CARR is responsible for manipulating industrial equipment for water, hydroelectric, sewage, and energy systems in the United States and Europe,” the department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said in a statement. said.
