A 20-year-old man in the United Kingdom was sentenced to two years in prison Monday after admitting to running an online abuse campaign that affected 117 victims across multiple countries during his time in the loosely organized online criminal network known as The Com.

Justin Swaddle, who was a minor when committed the crimes, pleaded guilty last month to a series of child sexual abuse offenses and blackmail. He was sentenced Monday at the same court and will be required to register as a sex offender.

The National Crime Agency, the U.K.’s lead law enforcement agency, had been investigating Swaddle since January 2024 after local police arrested him in October 2023 on charges of possessing, making and distributing indecent images. Investigators eventually found a broad online presence on Snapchat, Telegram and Discord, where he operated under usernames including “Epstein,” “Rugen” and “Moscow.”

A search of his phone and computer also turned up hundreds of sexually explicit conversations with young females, according to the NCA. Investigators determined Swaddle was part of The Com, a sprawling cybercriminal network of minors and young adults who engage in violence, extortion, sextortion and various forms of cybercrime. 

The NCA identified 117 female victims worldwide between the ages of 13 and 17, eight of them in the United Kingdom. One victim, 17, told investigators she met Swaddle on Discord in November 2022 before their conversations moved to Snapchat. She said Swaddle obtained her name, address and school details, then used that information to pressure her into various acts, threatening to expose her personal information unless she provided further images and videos.

“Justin Swaddle targeted young and vulnerable victims all over the world to abuse and scare them into carrying out shocking self-harm and sexual activity, purely to gain popularity with his peers online,” Danielle Pownall, an operations manager from the NCA, said in a release. “While the number of people involved in Com groups are relatively small, the impact it has on victims is high and long-lasting, as Swaddle’s offending shows.”

Law enforcement in both the U.K. and United States has been extremely active over the past few months in bringing Com-affiliated members to justice. Last week, a Canadian man who was linked with the group pleaded guilty for the widespread compromise of more than 165 Snowflake customer environments. Last month, a pair of young men tied to the Com were sentenced in the U.K. to 66 months in jail for committing a cyberattack on the Transport for London in 2024. 

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A Canadian man pleaded guilty to playing a central role in one of the most far-reaching cyberattacks of 2024 — the widespread compromise of more than 165 Snowflake customer environments, resulting in massive data theft for extortion, the Justice Department said Wednesday. 

Connor Moucka earned $495,000 by extorting his victims, offering stolen data for sale online, and in one case re-extorted a victim with stolen data of a government official and members of a then-former government official’s immediate family, authorities said.

Moucka and his alleged co-conspirators John Binns and Cameron Wagenius stole billions of sensitive records and received more than $2.5 million in extortion payments combined, according to prosecutors. Victims of the attack spree included AT&T, Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts and Santander.

“Hiding behind a screen is no shield from justice,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in a statement. “Moucka learned that when he was arrested just months after he began targeting U.S. companies, stealing sensitive information, and extorting victims for millions of dollars.”

Authorities arrested Moucka relatively quickly because he caused significant damage, said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B. 

“His gang went on a spree of maximizing harm, which directly correlated to maximizing the resources devoted to stopping it,” she said. 

“His behavior was bizarre throughout. Even while stealing data and extorting victims, he did many unnecessary things like threatening me because he thought I was working on his case. I was not working on his case before he threatened me,” Nixon added.

Moucka, who used several aliases online, including “Waifu,” “Judische,” “Catist” and “Ellyel8,” was arrested Oct. 30, 2024, in Kitchener, a city in the Canadian province of Ontario, at the behest of U.S. authorities. He was extradited to the United States in March 2025.

Moucka and his co-conspirators used stolen credentials to access the data storage platform’s customers’ accounts en masse. Records of more than 100 million people were exposed by the data theft campaign, including call and text history records, banking and other financial information, payroll records, government ID numbers and other personally identifiable data. 

Officials said victim companies bore more than $9.5 million in losses combined, not including losses attributable to their respective customers. 

Moucka’s threats and re-extortion tactics were calculated and predatory, and his actions did real harm to his victims, be they companies targeted for theft and extortion or the millions of everyday people who are their customers,” W. Mike Herrington, special agent in charge of the FBI Seattle field office, said in a statement.

Researchers said Moucka and his co-conspirators are all associated with The Com, a sprawling cybercriminal network of minors and young adults who engage in violence, extortion, sextortion and various forms of cybercrime.

“His legacy is one of failure. He extorted and then scammed his victims by not deleting the data, casting doubt on all future pay-or-leak extortion gangs,” Nixon said. 

“The pay-or-leak business model was popularized by him and his gang,” and his claims of data deletion were a lie, she added. “With copycat gangs, defenders grapple with the uncertainty of whether the threat actors are honest.”

Moucka pleaded guilty to computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and a related conspiracy. He is scheduled for sentencing Oct. 27 and faces up to 32 years in prison.

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From the Dutch Police: In an investigation into so-called online sadistic COM networks, a suspect from North Holland was arrested on Monday, July 20. As a member of the group ‘764’, the suspect allegedly asked girls to cut themselves and write his online username on surfaces such as walls with their blood—known as ‘bloodsigns’. He...

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A pair of young men were sentenced to 66 months in jail for committing a cyberattack on the Transport for London that brought the network’s operations to a standstill in 2024, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency said Thursday.

Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers were arrested at their homes in September 2025, barely a year after the attack, and pleaded guilty last month just as their trials were set to begin. Flowers was previously arrested in connection with the attack in September, but was released after questioning by officers.

Jubair and Flowers were leading members and highly involved in Scattered Spider, a nebulous hacker subset of The Com, according to researchers. The 20-year-old Jubair was a prolific cybercriminal and core member of the unbound collective. 

U.S. authorities last year accused Jubair of direct, prominent involvement in at least 120 cyberattacks, including extortion of 47 U.S.-based organizations and the January 2025 attack on the federal court system. 

Officials said they traced a combined total of at least $89.5 million in cryptocurrency, at the time of payments, to Bitcoin addresses and servers controlled by Jubair. Two financial services firms paid Jubair $25 million and $36.2 million, respectively, in Bitcoin between June and November 2023, according to an unsealed criminal complaint against Jubair. 

At the time of Jubair’s arrest, “he was one of the four principal people that we associated with Scattered Spider,” and one of the two most core players, Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. 

Jubair and Owens had significant resources and support, and “victim payments were reinvested back into the enterprise,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B. 

The lasting impact of Jubair and Owens’ capture and imprisonment remains hazy.

U.K. authorities insist Jubair and Owens’ arrests and punishment “effectively halted the group’s criminal activity,” yet they added that other cybercriminals continue to use the Scattered Spider brand in more recent attacks. 

Thursday’s announcement “represents a significant step in holding accountable two members of Scattered Spider, a group that has repeatedly relied on data extortion, SIM-swap attacks, and other social engineering techniques to infiltrate networks and undermine critical services,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI Cyber Division, said in a statement. 

The FBI also noted, in a LinkedIn post, that members of Scattered Spider “continue to victimize organizations around the world and cause significant financial and operational harm.”

When Owens, now 18, was first arrested for the Transport for London attack in 2024, investigators said he was “in the process of hacking the systems of U.S. health care companies SSM Health Care Corporation and Sutter Health, which had been infiltrated and damaged.”

Officials also said Jubair and Owens failed to cooperate after their arrests. 

“This is the largest cybercrime prosecution ever brought before the U.K. courts and the culmination of nearly two years of painstaking work,” Paul Foster, head of the National Crime Center’s National Cybercrime Unit, said in a statement. 

“Scattered Spider has been the most significant cybercrime threat to the U.K. in recent years. Through this investigation, we have severely disrupted that threat and brought key offenders to justice,” Foster added.

Despite the upbeat reaction from U.K. officials, Nixon said the punishment for Jubair and Owens is “remarkably lenient considering the period of continuous reoffending lasted longer than the sentence.”

Nixon hopes the United States will eventually extradite the pair to face additional charges. “If that happens, they won’t be able to use mental illness as a loophole to get back to harming society as soon as possible,” she added.

“No one who worked on their case was surprised they would reoffend, and there seems to be no allowance in the law to protect the public from what everyone knew was going to happen,” Nixon said. “I know the narrative in the cybercriminal culture will glorify them, but they wouldn’t if they knew the full story.”

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A San Antonio man who sexually exploited children while leading 8884, an offshoot of the notorious violent extremist collective 764, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in federal court Wednesday, the Justice Department said. 

Alexis Aldair Chavez began associating with 764 as a child in 2022 when a co-conspirator introduced him to 7997, one of many 764 offshoots affiliated with the Com. The sprawling nihilistic network of thousands of people, typically between 11 and 25 years old, seek to foster social unrest by destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of children and other vulnerable populations.

The 19-year-old, also known as “Zack” and “Zack8884,” attempted to coerce a girl to commit suicide and blackmailed another girl into self-mutiliation, animal torture and illicit content production in late 2023, according to court records. He later worked with multiple co-conspirators and blackmailed some of his victims to coerce other girls to degrade themselves on camera and produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Chavez was arrested and has been detained without bail since October 2024. He pleaded guilty to multiple crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children in December 2025 and faced up to 60 years in prison for racketeering, distribution and possession of CSAM.

“Chavez’s crimes reveal the ruthless exploitation and manipulation at the core of nihilistic violent extremist groups,” John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement. 

“These organizations target children as part of their broader mission to spread terror. These groups ultimately seek nothing less than the destruction of our society,” he added. “The National Security Division will use every resource at its disposal to identify and prosecute 764-linked criminality and to protect the most innocent among us from these predators.”

The indictment filed against Chavez in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas details a series of horrifying crimes he committed with co-conspirators and some of his victims. 

Prosecutors said Chavez and a co-conspirator coerced a girl to cut her tongue, and torture and kill a cat on a live video call in late 2023. He and co-conspirators also, that same month, groomed and extorted several other girls to commit self harm and degrade themselves on camera.

Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, told CyberScoop the sentence is appropriate even if people understandably dislike imprisoning young people. 

“In this space, a certain personality profile is highly predictive of who will risk a prison sentence like this: an obsession with maximizing harm,” she said. 

“Reoffending after release is a huge problem. All major global hacking incidents from the Com are done by serial reoffenders — all obsessed with harmfulness, some graduated from the 764 sextortion space,” Nixon added.

Too many jurisdictions are naive in how they handle cases involving members or associates of the Com, allowing these criminals to go home to parents who won’t supervise them, she said.

Officials pressed on this in their reaction to Chavez’s sentencing as well. “Parents need to know what their children are doing online and must stay engaged, ask difficult questions, and not fall into the trap of believing their child is ‘just playing games’ or ‘just talking with their friends,’” Justin R. Simmons, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said in a statement. 

“There is darkness present within many people in this world that want nothing more than to see the United States and western civilization fail. There is no limit to the actions these individuals will take to accomplish that goal, including torturing and abusing children,” Simmons added.

Chavez, who was also ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution and serve lifetime supervised release, joins other 764 members already serving long sentences for similar crimes. Bradley Chance Cadenhed, who founded 764 as a 15-year-old in 2021, was arrested later that year and sentenced to 80 years in prison in 2023. 

When the FBI executed a search warrant at Chavez’s residence in July 2024, prosecutors said he came out the backdoor and threw his phone over a neighbor’s fence in an attempt to hide evidence.

Chavez’s sentencing follows a period of heightened law enforcement activity, which has netted arrests of multiple alleged 764 leaders and members. Some of the alleged 764 members arrested since 2025  include: Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, Baron Cain Martin, Tony Christopher Long, Erik Lee Madison, Zachary Sweeney and Aaron Corey. 

“True rehabilitation is the best outcome, but no one knows how,” Nixon said. 

“The total number of offenders who fit this harm-obsessed profile is vanishingly small. Giving them maximum sentences won’t overflow jails,” she added. 

Law enforcement and judges have to be realistic about what it takes to prevent the victimization of children, and handing down lifelong or lengthy prison sentences strikes the right balance between the rights of the offender and society, Nixon said.

FBI officials and agents who track these offenders and gather evidence on their crimes draw similar conclusions. 

“Nothing is more abhorrent than those who prey on children and other vulnerable members of our society and this defendant will pay a steep price for doing just that,” Coult Markovsky, acting assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said in a statement.

“This sentencing demonstrates the FBI’s unwavering resolve to identify, hunt down, investigate, and prosecute criminals like Chavez who prey on children through violent online networks, including 764, and orchestrate horrific, unspeakable acts of exploitation and violence,” Daniel Faith, special agent in charge of the FBI San Antonio field office, said in a statement. 

“These predators use social media, messaging apps, gaming platforms, chat rooms, and video services to groom vulnerable children,” Faith added. “Staying engaged in your child’s online life, maintaining open communication, recognizing the warning signs, and reporting suspicious online activity to law enforcement are critical to stopping these offenders.”

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A Tennessee man accused of abusing and sexually exploiting children while actively participating in 764, a sprawling online nihilistic violent extremist collective affiliated with The Com, pleaded not guilty Thursday to a series of charges that could keep him locked up for 50 years.

Zachary Sweeney has allegedly victimized multiple children, on numerous occasions grooming and coercing minors to produce child sexual abuse material that he distributed and sometimes sold, the Justice Department said. One of the 30-year-old’s alleged victims later died of an overdose.

Sweeney has been the subject of multiple FBI investigations, which uncovered extensive crimes against children dating back to at least 2022, prosecutors said. His alleged involvement in 764 and, by extension, The Com, underscores the growing, multi-faceted threat of physical violence, cybercrime, extortion and the pursuit of criminal underground notoriety posed by thousands of members typically between 11 and 25 years old.

Victims of these crimes are often young, vulnerable and degraded or traumatized for years with life-altering impact.

“Violent extremists who victimize vulnerable children online are among the worst predators in our community and across the country,” Braden Boucek, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, said in a statement.

Members of 764 and related groups commit crimes in the United States and engage with other extremists globally to foment social unrest and destroy civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable people, the Justice Department said.

Police arrested Sweeney Thursday and charged him with three counts of sexual exploitation and attempted sexual exploitation of a minor and three counts of receiving visual depictions of CSAM. Prosecutors said they intend to request Sweeney remain detained at his next court appearance June 3. 

Sweeney allegedly traveled to New York, Indiana, Missouri and Georgia to meet numerous victims in person. Officials received reports from some of his alleged victims and online platforms, triggering FBI interviews with some of his alleged victims as early as 2023. 

One of his alleged victims, who began interacting with Sweeney when she was a teenager, told investigators she degraded herself and participated in virtual self-harm group video calls with a group of people she described as friends of his in The Com. Sweeney alleged raped her and streamed the crime online. 

She died of an overdose in 2024, approximately ten days after FBI agents interviewed her. 

Sweeney allegedly drugged and raped other victims and shared videos of those acts online, according to court records.

The FBI searched Sweeney’s residence in St. Louis in September 2023, more than two months after Meta sent a pair of tips to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that linked him to Instagram chats containing CSAM.

Agents seized devices containing evidence of 99 possible CSAM images and videos, but encryption and passwords prevented authorities from conducting further examination, according to court records.

Sweeney moved to Tennessee in the summer of 2024 and allegedly continued to travel out of state to meet victims in person and coerce other victims to produce CSAM through at least the summer of 2025.

Authorities accuse Sweeney of boasting about his crimes and sharing blackmail material, sexual assault and CSAM depicting underage female victims.

Authorities have arrested multiple members of 764 during the past year, reflecting heightened law enforcement activity targeting the violent extremist collective and other offshoots affiliated with The Com.

Two alleged leaders of 764, Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, were arrested and charged for directing and distributing CSAM in April. Alexis Aldair Chavez, of San Antonio, pleaded guilty in December to multiple crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children while acting as an administrator and leader of 8884, a splinter group of 764.

“This operation puts every child predator on notice: the FBI will hunt you down and bring you to justice,” Terence Reilly, special agent in charge of the FBI Nashville Field Office, said in a statement. “Removing violent extremists from our streets protects our most innocent and vulnerable members of society.”

You can read the indictment below.

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Instructure, the company behind Canvas, said it reached an agreement with the cybercriminals who threatened to leak a trove of sensitive data they claim was stolen during a prolonged cyberattack on the widely used education tech platform.

Pressure was mounting on the company as widespread outages left schools, students and teachers temporarily unable to access critical data late last week when the company took Canvas offline after the attackers defaced the platform’s login page. By Friday, the company said Canvas — a central hub for K-12 and university coursework, exams, grades and communication — was back online and fully operational. 

ShinyHunters, a decentralized crew of prolific cybercriminals that researchers affiliate with The Com, claimed responsibility for the attack on its data leak site and was attempting to extort the company for an unknown ransom amount. 

Instructure didn’t outright say it paid a ransom, but insisted the agreement provided all necessary assurances. “The data was returned to us. We received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs),” the company said in an update Monday.

“We have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted as a result of this incident, publicly or otherwise,” the company added. “This agreement covers all impacted Instructure customers, and there is no need for individual customers to attempt to engage with the unauthorized actor.”

The threat group initially set a deadline of May 6 — four days after Instructure previously said the incident was contained — claiming it stole 3.65 terabytes of data spanning 275 million records across 8,809 school systems. 

When that deadline passed without payment, ShinyHunters escalated its pressure on the company by “injecting an extortion message directly into the Canvas login pages of roughly 330 institutions, and pivoted to school-by-school extortion with a current deadline of May 12,” Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president of Halcyon’s Ransomware Research Center, told CyberScoop.

The additional public pressure prompted Infrastructure to take Canvas offline, disrupting schoolwork and access to critical systems nationwide. 

Instructure CEO Steve Daly apologized over the weekend for the company’s inconsistent communication and deficient public response to the cyberattack. 

“Over the past few days, many of you dealt with real disruption. Stress on your teams. Missed moments in the classroom. Questions you couldn’t get answered. You deserved more consistent communication from us, and we didn’t deliver it. I’m sorry for that,” he said in a statement.

Daly acknowledged that the attack, which remains under investigation aided by CrowdStrike, exposed usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages. He insisted that course content, submissions and credentials were not compromised.

The temporary but widespread disruption has spurred broad concern across the education sector as ransomware experts and threat hunters continue to track developments. The cyberattack also caught the attention of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. 

The House Homeland Security Committee on Monday published a letter to Daly seeking a briefing with him or a senior leader at Instructure by May 21. 

“The recurrence of an intrusion within days of an initial breach disclosure, and Instructure’s apparent failure to fully remediate the underlying vulnerabilities during that window, raise serious questions about the company’s incident response capabilities and its obligations to the institutions and individuals whose data it holds,” House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., wrote in the letter to Daly.

The committee wants to learn more about the “circumstances of both intrusions, the the nature and volume of data accessed, the steps Instructure has taken and is taking to contain the threat and notify affected institutions, and the adequacy of the company’s coordination with federal law enforcement and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” he added. 

CISA did not describe the extent of its involvement in Instructure’s response. “CISA is aware of a potential cyber incident affecting Canvas. As the nation’s cyber defense agency, we provide voluntary support and cybersecurity services to organizations in responding to and recovering from incidents,” Chris Butera, the agency’s acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement.

Instructure’s timeline of the attack has changed and remains incomplete. The company said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on April 29 and immediately revoked the attacker’s access and initiated an incident response. Researchers not directly involved with the formal investigation said ShinyHunters gained access to Canvas at least a few days earlier.

The follow-on malicious activity on May 7 — the defacement of public login pages — was tied to the same incident, the company said. 

“We have since confirmed that the unauthorized actor carried out this activity by exploiting an issue related to our Free-For-Teacher accounts. This is the same issue that led to the unauthorized access the prior week. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down Free-For-Teacher accounts,” the company said in an updated post about the incident.

Instructure did not answer questions about the vulnerability or explain how attackers intruded its systems. The company said it also revoked privileged credentials and access tokens for affected systems, rotated internal keys, restricted token creation pathways, and deployed additional security controls and monitoring.

Canvas is fully operational and safe to use, the company said, adding that CrowdStrike has reviewed known indicators of compromise and “found no evidence that the threat actor currently has access to the platform.”

Access still remains spotty and unavailable for some Canvas users as school districts restore the platform in phases after conducting their own internal checks.

Halcyon published an alert about the attack Friday, including a screenshot of the message that some school staff, guardians and students encountered before Instructure took the learning management system offline.

ShinyHunters is a notorious data theft extortion group that previously hit major cloud platforms, including Salesforce and Snowflake, via voice phishing, credential theft and supply-chain attacks. 

Education is a recurring and consistent target for cybercriminals, accounting for more than 250 ransomware attacks globally last year, according to Halcyon. 

Yet, the scope of the attack on Canvas “makes this one of the largest single education-sector exposures we’ve tracked,” Kaiser said.

“By compromising a shared platform used across thousands of schools, ShinyHunters hit the entire education sector in one move, which is the same playbook Clop ran against Oracle EBS customers last fall,” she added. “Among 2026 incidents against critical infrastructure, this is at or near the top for education-sector impact, and it highlights a trend of third-party software vendors now being part of an attack surface, and causing cascading effects across an entire sector.”

Cybersecurity professionals focused on ransomware and data theft extortion consistently encourage victims to not pay ransoms, but they also often acknowledge that companies have to make tough decisions based on their own interests and the security of their customers or users caught up in the aftermath.

Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, said the threat group claiming responsibility for the attack should not be trusted. 

“They are claiming they will delete the data after they are paid, and if they are not paid that they will leak the data,” she told CyberScoop. “This is in line with the past data extortion scams run by the same and related Com actors, who have made false statements to victims and to the public in the past.”

Instructure acknowledged that its agreement with the attackers isn’t ironclad. “While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.

Daly — a longtime security executive who was previously CEO at Ivanti — ended his mea culpa with a pledge to improve communications and provide a summary of a forensics report soon.

“Last week, we made a call to get the facts right before speaking publicly. That instinct isn’t wrong, but we got the balance wrong. We focused on fact-finding and went quiet when you needed consistent updates. You’ve been clear about that, and it’s fair feedback. We will change that moving forward,” he said. 

“Rebuilding trust takes time,” Daly added. “We’re going to earn it back through consistent action and honest communication.”

Update: May 12, 11:00 am: This story has been updated to reflect that Instructure announced they have reached a deal with ShinyHunters.

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