FBI Says Thousands Involved in Ransomware, Swatting

The FBI released a warning yesterday about a loosely-organized cybercriminal organization called The Com. The Com launches cyberattacks to steal money and information.

The FBI released 3 security bulletins about The Com, a group made up of English-speaking minors, but which has expanded to include THOUSANDS of people who commit a variety of crimes.

The crimes include ransomware, swatting, extortion of minors, child sexual abuse material, denial of service attacks, SIM swapping, crypto theft and other attacks. Kind of a full service criminal syndicate. This increases the focus that the FBI has on them.

While the FBI has known about and talked about the group for a while, they are getting smarter, using better techniques, hiding their identities, laundering money and generally keeping a low profile.

The group uses minors hoping that they will be prosecuted as minors if they get caught.

Like any good crime syndicate, they have subgroups with different areas of expertise.

They also have “affiliates”. Scattered Spider is one of their affiliates. Scattered Spider was responsible for the MGM hack and has been in the news a lot lately.

Like all good crime networks, they fight among themselves, mostly over money (crypto).

And of course, they brag about how much money they have stolen.

And, like the mafia, they use kidnapping, torture, threats of violence on family members and use guns in attacks on each other and rivals. Just some overall good people.

The extortion department primarily exploits children. The FBI says they extort minors, usually girls, and threaten them with doxing, swatting and violence if their demands are not met.

Another department, 764, is an offshoot group and focuses on grooming, manipulation and extortion of minors to produce what used to be called kiddie porn, now called CSAM.

At this point it does not look like the feds have a good handle on how to bring them down. Given that the group is as large and decentralized as it appears to be, that could be hard.

Credit: The Record

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