U.S. prosecutors unveiled criminal charges on Wednesday against five alleged members of Scattered Spider, a community of young hackers suspected of breaking into dozens of U.S. companies to steal confidential information and cryptocurrency. Reuters reports:
Martin Estrada, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, said 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.
One of those arrested, Tyler Buchanan of Scotland, was arrested in June in Spain and is awaiting extradition to the U.S.
Read more at MSN.
