The FBI released a trove of research on The Com last week, warning that the sprawling cybercriminal network of minors and young adults is growing rapidly and splintering into three primary subsets described by officials as Hacker Com, In Real Life Com and Extortion Com.

The warnings lay out how The Com’s thousands of members, typically between 11 and 25 years old, pose a rising threat, especially to youth online, the FBI said. Criminal acts committed by these multiple, interconnected networks include swatting, extortion and sextortion of minors, production and distribution of child sexual abuse material, violent crime and various other cybercrimes, the bureau said.

“The motivations behind the criminal activity vary, but often fall within one of the following: financial gain, retaliation, ideology, sexual gratification and notoriety,” the FBI said in a public service announcement.

Crimes attributed to members of The Com have grown increasingly complex, with perpetrators going to great lengths to mask identities, hide financial transactions and launder money. The Com generally targets young and impressionable people for recruitment on gaming sites and social media platforms to indoctrinate them into their ideology, officials said.

Various subsections of this group have been linked to high-profile crimes over the past few years. In April, two men accused of leading a Com offshoot known as “764” were charged with operating an international child exploitation enterprise. Scattered Spider, another offshoot, tends to focus on cybercrime like ransomware and data extortion. 

Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, commended the level of detail the FBI shared across the series of PSAs, noting that the agency left nothing of importance out of its warnings. Nixon has studied domestic and English-speaking cybercrime and tracked its rise for more than a decade.

“The assessments in this PSA are consistent with what we have seen. There has been a population explosion in The Com and it is good to see law enforcement respond to this — not just with a PSA but with real crackdowns,” she said.

“Hopefully this PSA helps the public understand that many cybercrime arrests nowadays implicate gang violence and sexual crime against children, by children.”

Hacker Com

Hacker Com members are involved in a vast array of cybercrime activities, including distributed denial-of-service attacks, personally identifiable information theft, the sale of government email accounts, ransomware attacks, phishing, malware development and deployment, cryptocurrency theft, intrusions and SIM swapping, according to the FBI.

Scattered Spider, which is responsible for attacks on more than 100 businesses since 2022, is included in this subset.

This subset of The Com uses remote access trojans, phishing kits, voice over internet protocol providers, voice modulators, virtual private networks, cryptocurrency cash-out services, live-streaming services and encrypted email domains, officials said.

“Open-source information indicates Hacker Com groups are responsible for high-profile attacks and intrusions and have affiliations with ransomware organizations,” the FBI said in a PSA dedicated solely to Hacker Com.

The group also has been observed using the same attack methods against each other. The FBI warning details how internal conflicts are common among members of The Com. Personal disputes or rivalries — often over cryptocurrency — frequently lead Hacker Com members to attack and steal from one another, the FBI said.

In Real Life (IRL) Com

Some Com subgroups have gone beyond digital means, offering swat-for-hire services and targeting members for swatting and doxxing, kidnapping and physical extortion, which the FBI refers to as “IRL Com.” 

“The intensification of these online conflicts has resulted in the emergence of a new layer of The Com known as In Real Life (IRL) Com, which includes subgroups that aim to facilitate real world acts of violence, oftentimes resulting from online conflicts,” the FBI said.

Acts of physical violence have intensified and expanded to other layers of The Com, as multiple subgroups adopt similar methods of retaliation, the FBI said in a PSA dedicated solely to IRL Com. Some subgroups advertise contracts on messaging apps or other social media networks to commit violence or swatting for payment. 

“IRL Com groups also see swatting as a way of gaining credibility among members; the more attention a swatting incident gets, the more attention the member receives from the group,” the FBI said. “Leaders from IRL Com groups may use swatting to ensure members of the group remain obedient. When members of the IRL Com group disobey orders or refuse to comply with demands, the member or the member’s family may become the target of swatting.”

Extortion Com

The FBI also released a PSA about a subgroup it calls “Extortion Com,” which “systematically targets underage females” and vulnerable populations, including children and those who struggle with mental health issues.

“Victims are typically between the ages of 10 and 17 years old, but the FBI has seen some victims as young as 9 years old,” the FBI said in its PSA. “Threat actors often groom their victims by first establishing a trusting or romantic relationship before eventually manipulating and coercing them into engaging in escalating harmful behavior designed to shame and isolate them.”

Officials said these acts are driven by a range of personal motives, including the pursuit of social status, sexual gratification or a sense of belonging. 

The FBI warns that members of this subgroup manipulate or coerce their victims to produce pornographic material or other videos depicting animal cruelty and self-harm, oftentimes further threatening to share the material with victims’ families, friends or other public communities on the internet.

Two alleged leaders of the child sextortion group 764 were arrested and charged for directing and distributing CSAM in April. The two men, Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, are accused of exploiting at least eight minor victims, some as young as 13 years old, and face charges that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Officials advised people to look for warning signs that a victim may be targeted by The Com and shared resources for help, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline and Take It Down service. Victims are encouraged to retain all information about an incident and immediately report to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and an FBI Field Office.

The post FBI alerts tie together threats of cybercrime, physical violence from The Com appeared first on CyberScoop.

Authorities in the United Kingdom this week arrested four people aged 17 to 20 in connection with recent data theft and extortion attacks against the retailers Marks & Spencer and Harrods, and the British food retailer Co-op Group. The breaches have been linked to a prolific but loosely-affiliated cybercrime group dubbed “Scattered Spider,” whose other recent victims include multiple airlines.

The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) declined verify the names of those arrested, saying only that they included two males aged 19, another aged 17, and 20-year-old female.

Scattered Spider is the name given to an English-speaking cybercrime group known for using social engineering tactics to break into companies and steal data for ransom, often impersonating employees or contractors to deceive IT help desks into granting access. The FBI warned last month that Scattered Spider had recently shifted to targeting companies in the retail and airline sectors.

KrebsOnSecurity has learned the identities of two of the suspects. Multiple sources close to the investigation said those arrested include Owen David Flowers, a U.K. man alleged to have been involved in the cyber intrusion and ransomware attack that shut down several MGM Casino properties in September 2023. Those same sources said the woman arrested is or recently was in a relationship with Flowers.

Sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Flowers, who allegedly went by the hacker handles “bo764,” “Holy,” and “Nazi,” was the group member who anonymously gave interviews to the media in the days after the MGM hack. His real name was omitted from a September 2024 story about the group because he was not yet charged in that incident.

The bigger fish arrested this week is 19-year-old Thalha Jubair, a U.K. man whose alleged exploits under various monikers have been well-documented in stories on this site. Jubair is believed to have used the nickname “Earth2Star,” which corresponds to a founding member of the cybercrime-focused Telegram channel “Star Fraud Chat.”

In 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published an investigation into the work of three different SIM-swapping groups that phished credentials from T-Mobile employees and used that access to offer a service whereby any T-Mobile phone number could be swapped to a new device. Star Chat was by far the most active and consequential of the three SIM-swapping groups, who collectively broke into T-Mobile’s network more than 100 times in the second half of 2022.

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Jubair also was a core member of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group that broke into dozens of technology companies in 2022, stealing source code and other internal data from tech giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, Okta, Rockstar Games, Samsung, T-Mobile, and Uber.

In April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published internal chat records from LAPSUS$, and those chats indicated Jubair was using the nicknames Amtrak and Asyntax. At one point in the chats, Amtrak told the LAPSUS$ group leader not to share T-Mobile’s logo in images sent to the group because he’d been previously busted for SIM-swapping and his parents would suspect he was back at it again.

As shown in those chats, the leader of LAPSUS$ eventually decided to betray Amtrak by posting his real name, phone number, and other hacker handles into a public chat room on Telegram.

That story about the leaked LAPSUS$ chats connected Amtrak/Asyntax/Jubair to the identity “Everlynn,” the founder of a cybercriminal service that sold fraudulent “emergency data requests” targeting the major social media and email providers. In such schemes, the hackers compromise email accounts tied to police departments and government agencies, and then send unauthorized demands for subscriber data while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

Sources say Jubair also used the nickname “Operator,” and that until recently he was the administrator of the Doxbin, a long-running and highly toxic online community that is used to “dox” or post deeply personal information on people. In May 2024, several popular cybercrime channels on Telegram ridiculed Operator after it was revealed that he’d staged his own kidnapping in a botched plan to throw off law enforcement investigators.

In November 2024, U.S. authorities charged five men aged 20 to 25 in connection with the Scattered Spider group, which has long relied on recruiting minors to carry out its most risky activities. Indeed, many of the group’s core members were recruited from online gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft in their early teens, and have been perfecting their social engineering tactics for years.

“There is a clear pattern that some of the most depraved threat actors first joined cybercrime gangs at an exceptionally young age,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at the New York based security firm Unit 221B. “Cybercriminals arrested at 15 or younger need serious intervention and monitoring to prevent a years long massive escalation.”