A pair of persistent and problematic threat groups affiliated with The Com are actively targeting organizations across multiple critical infrastructure sectors for rapid data theft and extortion attacks, according to CrowdStrike.

The financially-motivated attackers, which CrowdStrike tracks as Cordial Spider and Snarky Spider, have used voice-phishing and social engineering attacks to break into victims’ identity platforms and traverse SaaS environments since at least October 2025, the company said in a report Thursday, which it shared exclusively with CyberScoop prior to release. 

Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, said the subgroups composed of native English speakers primarily target U.S.-based organizations in the academic, aviation, retail, hospitality, automotive, financial services, legal and technology sectors.

This “new wave of ecrime threat actors” are closely aligned with Scattered Spider and linked to other subsets of The Com, including SLSH and ShinyHunters, Meyers said. 

Because these attacks target identity systems and can expose data in other connected services beyond the initial breach point, it’s difficult to determine how many victims have been caught up in these campaigns. 

CrowdStrike’s warning closely follows research Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 and the Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center shared last week about Cordial Spider’s string of attacks targeting organizations in the retail and hospitality industry, among others. 

Cordial and Snarky Spider have set lures via voice calls, text messages and emails directing targeting employees to phishing pages posing as their employer’s legitimate single sign-on page or primary identity provider, researchers said. 

These phishing pages, which capture credentials, session keys or tokens, depending on the workflow, provide attackers an entry point into systems, which they exploit for widespread access across victims’ entire SaaS ecosystems.

Attackers use these initial hooks to remove and establish multi-factor authentication devices, then delete emails and other alerts that would otherwise warn organizations of potential malicious activity, researchers said. 

The data theft for extortion campaigns share striking similarities, but CrowdStrike said the tactics, techniques and procedures for each subgroup are distinct. These variances include hours of operation, different phishing domain providers, preferred operating systems, data leak sites, and the tools or devices they used to register for multi-factor authentication. 

The domain for BlackFile, Cordial Spider’s data-leak site, was offline as of Wednesday, according to Meyers.

CrowdStrike declined to put a range on the groups’ extortion demands, but Unit 42 previously said Cordial Spider, which is also tracked as CL-CRI-1116 and UNC6671, are typically in the seven-figure range.

Some victims that didn’t pay extortion demands have been subjected to DDoS attacks, and Snarky Spider has used more aggressive follow-on harassment tactics, including the swatting of victim organizations’ employees, Meyers said. 

CrowdStrike said Cordial and Snarky Spider also use residential proxy networks — including Mullvad, Oxylabs, NetNut, 9Proxy, Infatica and NSOCKS — to evade IP-based detection and blend in with typical traffic. 

Residential proxy networks, which rely on IP addresses assigned to real home users, can serve a legitimate purpose, but researchers have been warning that unethical or outright criminal operators are abusing these networks to build and support botnets, cybercrime campaigns, espionage and other malicious activity.

Cordial and Snarky Spider haven’t achieved the impact or technical capability of Scattered Spider, but the groups share many commonalities and objectives, Meyers said. 

“They’ve kind of taken their playbook and they’re using a lot of their techniques, but we haven’t really seen the technical sophistication demonstrated by them that we saw from Scattered Spider,” he said. “It’s kind of the new generation of Scattered Spider.”

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The growth of data centers — and adversaries’ targeting of them — left lawmakers at a hearing Wednesday contemplating whether the federal government has the right setup for defending them.

Some industry witnesses and experts at the hearing of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection testified that the answer might be to give data centers their own standalone designation as a critical infrastructure sector.

The question of how to secure data centers against cyber and physical attacks coincides with artificial intelligence fuelling a boom in the building of such facilities across the United States. Last month, Iranian drones targeted two Amazon data centers in response to the U.S.-Israel bombing campaign on Iran, and a third data center in Bahrain was struck as well.

“If a major data center is attacked, disrupted, or taken offline, the consequences can reach far beyond one company or one sector,” Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., said in prepared opening remarks. “Yet our current framework does not provide a clear, unified approach to data center security. It does not clearly answer which federal agency is responsible for understanding the risk, coordinating with industry, or leading the response when this infrastructure is targeted.”

Three providers account for 63 percent of the market share of data centers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. 

The United Kingdom already has deemed data centers as a standalone critical infrastructure sector. Reps. Vince Fong, R-Calif., and LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., asked panel witnesses Wednesday about federal protection of them.

“Given the scrutiny that is required to make sure that those data centers are secure, there would be a benefit in having them work together as a unique coordinating council,” said Robert Mayer, senior vice president for cybersecurity and innovation at USTelecom, an industry group.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Montgomery suggested a sector that combines data centers and cloud providers, given the overlap in ownership. The 2024 rewrite of a White House national security memo left some experts disappointed that it didn’t designate cloud computing as a critical infrastructure sector. 

Samuel Visner, chair of the board of directors of the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said he agreed, given the role data centers are playing in the U.S. economy, military and other dependencies. “Finding a way to regard them as part of our critical infrastructure and protect them accordingly is sine qua non, absolutely necessary,” he said.

A fourth witness didn’t weigh in on the need for a separate critical infrastructure designation. But Scott Algeier, executive director of Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said his organization had created a “special interest group” for data center providers.

“The data centers are integrated already into the critical infrastructure discussions,” he told the panel.

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Professional NBA and NFL athletes were allegedly deceived and victimized by a 34-year-old Georgia man’s sneaky social-engineering scheme that he ran while impersonating a well-known adult film star, the Justice Department said Monday.

Kwamaine Jerell Ford allegedly initiated and committed some of the crimes while incarcerated in federal prison for a similar, widespread phishing scam that also targeted college and professional athletes and musical artists starting in 2015. 

“While serving time for stealing credit card numbers from athletes and celebrities to fund his lifestyle, Ford allegedly engaged in the same conduct again,” Theodore S. Hertzberg, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement.

The alleged repeat offender, while adopting the persona of an adult film model, tricked professional athletes into providing him their iCloud login credentials and multifactor authentication codes for those accounts to steal financial and personally identifiable information to pay for personal expenses.

Ford is accused of executing more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions on professional athletes’ debit and credit cards from November 2020 to September 2024, according to an unsealed indictment. He was in federal custody for the first 14 months of the conspiracy and released on probation for prior crimes in January 2022.

Prosecutors did not name victims, divulge how many athletes Ford allegedly victimized during his latest scheme, or how much money he obtained through the conspiracy. 

He pleaded not guilty Friday to 22 charges for crimes including wire fraud, obtaining information by computer from a protected computer, access device fraud, aggravated identity theft and sex trafficking. Ford is being held without bail pending a trial. 

Using the adult film model’s identity, Ford allegedly enticed his high-profile victims to communicate with him on social media by falsely claiming he would send them adult film content through iCloud.

When a professional athlete responded, Ford allegedly sent phishing messages to the victim designed to look like legitimate Apple customer service text messages. Officials said Ford spoofed legitimate Apple customer service accounts and posed as an Apple customer support representative to request victims’ login details via text messages.

Prosecutors said Ford told his victims the messages contained a video file shared through an iCloud link that required them to reply with an MFA code. Ford allegedly attempted to access his victims’ iCloud accounts at the same time, triggering an MFA code delivery to the victim’s device.

Professional athletes who provided their iCloud MFA codes to Ford were ultimately tricked into giving him complete access to their iCloud accounts, officials said. Ford allegedly used that access to steal sensitive data, driver’s licenses and credit card information that he used for personal spending.

Ford also, while impersonating the adult film star, allegedly victimized an OnlyFans model by claiming he would advance their career. Prosecutors said Ford enticed the OnlyFans model to engage in and record commercial sex acts with professional athletes without their consent. 

“Ford clearly did not learn from his prior conviction for a similar scheme. This time, he allegedly escalated his criminal activity — stealing identities and money while also moving into coercion and sex trafficking,” Peter Ellis, acting special agent in charge at the FBI Atlanta office, said in a statement. 

Ford allegedly advertised the victim to targeted athletes, coordinated their travel to coincide with athletes’ known locations, and negotiated payments from the athletes for sex with the victim. Prosecutors said Ford took a financial cut from those commercial sex acts, many of which the victim was coerced into filming without the athletes’ knowledge. 

Ford is also accused of using these videos from the OnlyFans model to engage with additional athletes under false pretenses. When the OnlyFans model resisted filming the sex acts, Ford allegedly coerced them to send him money in lieu of the videos.

In 2019, Ford was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of almost $700,000 after he pleaded guilty to computer fraud and aggravated identity theft. That scheme, which also ran for about four years, allowed Ford to hack into more than 100 Apple accounts belonging to high-profile professional athletes and rappers. 

Ford was still in prison for those crimes when he allegedly established a new scheme targeting similar victims on some of the same technology platforms.

You can read the indictment below.

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