Maksim Silnikau was the creator and administrator of the ransomware group and involved in Angler EK’s distribution.

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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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Colorado Governor Jared Polis has commuted the prison sentence of Tina Peters, the former Mesa County election clerk who was sentenced last year to serve nine years in state prison for carrying out one of the most serious election-related data breaches in U.S. history.

Peters was arrested in 2021, accused of abusing her position as clerk to break into Mesa County election facilities under false pretenses, steal election and voting machine data and share them with allies of President Donald Trump in a quixotic quest to prove he won the 2020 presidential election.

Peters has served less than a year and a half of a nine-year prison sentence handed down last year by a judge after she was convicted of using another Mesa County resident’s identity to enter county election facilities, where she stole voting data from the 2020 election and shared it with Trump allies online.

Peters hoped the data would show that Trump actually won the state in 2020. It did not. Election and cybersecurity experts have said Peters’ actions were a serious breach of election data, while Mesa County officials say it has cost them millions of dollars to deal with the legal fallout while Peters ran for higher office in 2022.

In handing down her nine-year prison sentence, Judge Matthew Barrett called Peters a “charlatan” and deserved a longer punishment because “I’m convinced you’d do it all over again.”

But for months, Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis has hinted at pardoning or commuting her sentence,  claiming that it was overly harsh for her crimes.

Trump has attempted to pressure state officials to pardon or commute Peters’ sentence. Because Peters was convicted of state crimes, she could be freed by a federal pardon alone, though Trump tried that as well.

In the past, Polis has claimed that he would only grant clemency to Peters if she showed remorse for her crimes. However, Peters’ own community and neighbors in Mesa County testified at her sentencing hearing last year that she has been largely unrepentant even after she was arrested and charged.

A review of dozens of Polis pardons and commutations as Colorado Governor by Denver news affiliate KUSA shows that Polis has never previously pardoned or commuted the sentence of a prisoner who did not openly express remorse for their crimes. Polis claimed in an interview with the outlet that Peters expressed regret.

Polis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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A federal judge sentenced a Latvian national to 102 months in prison for his involvement in a series of ransomware attacks for more than two years prior to his arrest in 2023, the Justice Department said Monday.

Deniss Zolotarjovs, a resident of Moscow at the time, helped an organization led by former leaders of the Conti ransomware group extort payments from more than 54 companies. 

The 35-year-old was mostly tasked with putting pressure on the crew’s victims. In one case, Zolotarjovs urged co-conspirators to leak or sell children’s health records stolen from a pediatric healthcare company and ultimately sent a collection of sensitive data to “hundreds of patients,” according to court records. 

The ransomware crew identified itself in ransom notes under multiple names during Zolotarjovs’ involvement, including Conti, Karakurt, Royal, TommyLeaks, SchoolBoys Ransomware, Akira and others. 

Zolotarjov and his co-conspirators extorted nearly $16 million in confirmed ransom payments from their victims. Officials estimate the group’s crimes resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, not including the psychological and future financial exposure confronting tens of thousands of people whose personal data was stolen.

“Deniss Zolotarjovs helped his ransomware gang profit from hacks of dozens of companies, and even on a government entity whose 911 system was forced offline,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. 

Officials said Zolotarjovs searched for points of leverage after researching victim companies and analyzing stolen data. Many of the victims impacted during his active participation between June 2021 and August 2023 were based in the United States.

Zolotarjov was arrested in the country of Georgia in December 2023 and extradited to the United States in August 2024. He pleaded guilty to money laundering and wire fraud in July 2025. 

“Cybercriminals might think they are invulnerable by hiding behind anonymizing tools and complex cryptocurrency patterns while they attack American victims from non-extradition countries,” Dominick S. Gerace II, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said in a statement. “But Zolotarjovs’s prosecution shows that federal law enforcement also has a global reach, and we will hold accountable bad actors like Zolotarjovs, who will now spend significant time in prison.”

The Russian ransomware crew was prolific and spread across multiple teams, relying on companies registered in Russia, Europe and the United States to conceal its operations. Authorities said the group included former Russian law enforcement officers whose connections allowed members to access Russian government databases to harass detractors and identify potential new recruits.

Conti was among the most prolific ransomware groups globally for a time, impacting hundreds of critical infrastructure providers, Costa Rica’s government in 2022, and ultimately leading the State Department to offer a $10 million reward for information related to Conti’s leaders. The group was notoriously resilient, bouncing back with new infrastructure and hitting new targets after a massive leak exposed chats between the group’s members in 2022.

Conti disbanded later that year, but members of the Cyrillic-language group rebranded under three subgroups: Zeon, Black Basta and Quantum, which quickly rebranded to Royal, before rebranding again to BlackSuit in 2024.

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