Cybersecurity researchers have tied a fresh round of cyber attacks targeting financial services to the notorious cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, casting doubt on their claims of going “dark.”
Threat intelligence firm ReliaQuest said it has observed indications that the threat actor has shifted their focus to the financial sector. This is supported by an increase in lookalike domains potentially linked to the group that are geared towards the industry vertical, as well as a recently identified targeted intrusion against an unnamed U.S. banking organization.
“Scattered Spider gained initial access by socially engineering an executive’s account and resetting their password via Azure Active Directory Self-Service Password Management,” the company said.
“From there, they accessed sensitive IT and security documents, moved laterally through the Citrix environment and VPN, and compromised VMware ESXi infrastructure to dump credentials and further infiltrate the network.”
To achieve privilege escalation, the attackers reset a Veeam service account password, assigned Azure Global Administrator permissions, and relocated virtual machines to evade detection. There are also signs that Scattered Spider attempted to exfiltrate data from Snowflake, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and other repositories.
Exit or Smokescreen?
The recent activity undercuts the group’s claims that they were ceasing operations alongside 14 other criminal groups, such as LAPSUS$. Scattered Spider is the moniker assigned to a loose-knit hacking collective that’s part of a broader online entity called The Com.
The group also shares a high degree of overlap with other cybercrime crews like ShinyHunters and LAPSUS$, so much so that the three clusters formed an overarching entity named “scattered LAPSUS$ hunters.”
One of these clusters, notably ShinyHunters, has also engaged in extortion efforts after exfiltrating sensitive data from victims’ Salesforce instances. In these cases, the activity took place months after the targets were compromised by another financially motivated hacking group tracked by Google-owned Mandiant as UNC6040.
The incident is a reminder not to be lulled into a false sense of security, ReliaQuest added, urging organizations to stay vigilant against the threat. As in the case of ransomware groups, there is no such thing as retirement, as it’s very much possible for them to regroup or rebrand under a different alias in the future.
“The recent claim that Scattered Spider is retiring should be taken with a significant degree of skepticism,” Karl Sigler, security research manager of SpiderLabs Threat Intelligence at Trustwave, said. “Rather than a true disbanding, this announcement likely signals a strategic move to distance the group from increasing law enforcement pressure.”
Sigler also pointed out that the farewell letter should be viewed as a strategic retreat, allowing the group to reassess its practices, refine its tradecraft, and evade ongoing efforts to put a lid on its activities, not to mention complicate attribution efforts by making it harder to tie future incidents to the same core actors.
“It’s plausible that something within the group’s operational infrastructure has been compromised. Whether through a breached system, an exposed communication channel, or the arrest of lower-tier affiliates, something has likely triggered the group to go dark, at least temporarily. Historically, when cybercriminal groups face heightened scrutiny or suffer internal disruption, they often ‘retire’ in name only, opting instead to pause, regroup, and eventually re-emerge under a new identity.”
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