Meet Scattered Spider: The Group Currently Scattering UK Retail Organizations

Editor’s Note: This blog builds on our recent analysis of the DragonForce ransomware cartel, which claimed responsibility for a wave of UK retail attacks in April–May 2025. While DragonForce took credit for the extortion and data leak phase, growing evidence suggests that another group—Scattered Spider—may have played a foundational role in enabling those attacks. Known for its cloud-first, identity-centric intrusion methods, Scattered Spider is emerging as a likely access broker or collaborator within the DragonForce affiliate model.

Scattered Spider (also known as Roasting 0ktapus and Scatter Swine) is a financially motivated threat actor that has been actively operating since May 2022. Historically focused on telecommunications and business process outsourcing (BPO), the group has evolved to target high-leverage industries, including critical infrastructure and, more recently, UK retail organizations.

While Scattered Spider has not publicly claimed responsibility for the UK retail intrusions, the initial access tactics, cloud exploitation, and social engineering techniques observed in those breaches align closely with the group’s known behavior. It is increasingly likely that Scattered Spider was involved in the early-stage intrusion, which was then followed by ransomware deployment and extortion by DragonForce or one of its affiliates.

This evolving threat model reflects a broader shift in the ransomware ecosystem, where access operators, malware developers, and extortion actors collaborate without co-branding, often using white-labeled infrastructure.

Potential targeting of UK retail and telco supply chains highlights a focus on high-leverage industries during peak seasons. Scattered Spider’s combination of social engineering and cloud exploitation, emphasizing persistence and stealth, poses significant risks.

This is particularly true for the UK retail industry due to third-party vendor dependencies and the group’s adeptness at lateral movement. High helpdesk turnover and seasonal staff vulnerabilities to vishing during peak sales periods facilitates password resets and MFA attacks, while loyalty data and payment tokens remain valuable targets even without encryption.

Despite this shift in targets, Scattered Spider remains committed to employing an array of social engineering tactics in their attacks. These tactics include Telegram and SMS phishing, SIM swapping, exploiting Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) fatigue, and other strategies. Notably, the group has frequently posed as IT personnel to deceive individuals into divulging their credentials or granting remote access to their computers. Scattered Spider has also been associated with various past phishing campaigns and the deployment of malicious kernel drivers, including the use of a signed but malicious version of the Windows Intel Ethernet diagnostics driver.

In mid-2023, it was reported that Scattered Spider became involved in the BlackCat ransomware operation, initiating the deployment of ransomware payloads on both Windows and Linux systems, and subsequently targeting VMWare ESXi servers.

Representatives of BlackCat have stated that they collaborate exclusively with Russian-speaking affiliates. Therefore, Scattered Spider’s participation as an affiliate in this Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) likely reflects the ongoing evolution of a Russian-speaking RaaS group focused on maximizing financial gains. It is probable that a key condition for recruiting affiliates is to refrain from targeting organizations within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Victimology

In August 2022, an American cloud communications company detected an unauthorized breach that exposed information pertaining to 163 of its customers. The compromised data included mobile phone numbers and SMS messages containing one-time passwords, which Scattered Spider gained access to through the console. The threat actor employed a phishing kit designed to capture usernames, passwords, and one-time password (OTP) factors. Their targets primarily encompassed technology companies, telecommunications providers, and entities and individuals associated with cryptocurrency.

In December 2022, a campaign by Scattered Spider was found, targeting organizations within the telecom and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors with an end objective of gaining access to mobile carrier networks.

As of January 2023, Scattered Spider had been implicated in over six incidents that transpired since mid-2022. These incidents revolved around the targeting of prominent outsourcing firms catering to crypto-currency entities and individuals of substantial value.

Recently, they have been targeting UK retail companies.

Malware, Toolset & TTPs

Scattered Spider is known for theft of sensitive data and leveraging trusted organizational infrastructure for follow-on attacks on downstream customers.

Scattered Spider typically capitalizes on vulnerabilities like CVE-2015-2291 and utilizes tools such as STONESTOP and POORTRY to disable security software, evading detection. This group exhibits a profound comprehension of the Azure environment and effectively employs built-in tools during their operations. Following initial access acquisition, Scattered Spider has been observed conducting reconnaissance across a range of environments, including Windows, Linux, Google Workspace, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and AWS. Additionally, they engage in lateral movement and download supplementary tools to exfiltrate VPN and MFA enrollment data in specific instances. The group also establishes persistence through legitimate remote access tools like AnyDesk, LogMeIn, and ConnectWise Control.

POORTRY is a malicious driver employed for the purpose of terminating specific processes on Windows systems, such as an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agent running on an endpoint. To avoid detection, attackers have gone to the extent of signing the POORTRY driver with a Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Authenticode signature.

STONESTOP, on the other hand, is a Windows userland utility that endeavors to cease processes by generating and introducing a malicious driver. This utility operates both as a loader and installer for POORTRY and serves as an orchestrator for instructing the driver regarding the actions it should execute.

Scattered Spider’s techniques

Recent Attack 1

• Gathered mobile phone numbers of employees from commercially available data aggregation services
• Targeted employees with phishing, including smishing and voice phishing.
• Harvested credentials through targeted phishing pages
• Relayed One Time Password (OTP) through phishing pages
• Distributed the commercial RMM tool AnyDesk
• Used anonymising proxy services
• Took over user accounts
• Conducted further smishing attacks against Technology/Telecommunications individuals linked to cryptocurrency

Recent Attack 2 Dec 2022

• Gathered mobile phone numbers of employees
• Targeted employees with phishing, including smishing, Telegram message and phone calls
• Impersonated IT personnel for phishing
• Accessed Azure account using stolen credentials
• Exploited CVE in ForgeRock OpenAM application server
• Distributed various RMM tools
• Persisted using VPN access, AWS key theft and IAM manipulation
• Exploited the Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOD) technique to bypass endpoint security
• Deployed the Remote Access Trojan (RAT) RattyRAT
• Conducted further smishing attacks
• Gained access to mobile carrier network and SIM card information
• Exfiltrated data using transfer[.]sh
• Performed SIM swapping

Recent Attack 3 – September 2023

• Purchased stolen credentials from cybercriminal market
• Gathered mobile phone numbers of employees
• Targeted employees with phishing, including smishing and phone calls
• Used phone-based social engineering
• Leveraged MFA bombing
• Performed SIM swapping
• Used the commercial residential proxy services NSOCKS and TrueSocks
• Distributed various RMM tools
• Created publicly accessible virtual machines inside victims’ environments
• Deployed commodity malware (infostealers, reconnaissance, privilege escalation)
• Targeted VMware vCenters servers using the open-source bedevil Linux rootkit
• Achieved privilege escalation by resetting password or modifying multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Performed reconnaissance and credential dump using public tools
• Enumerated the internal documentation and resources
• Achieved privilege escalation by targeting password managers or IAM
• Disabled security products
• Exfiltrated data using Rclone, MEGAsync, FileZilla or DropBox
• Deleted shadow copies, disabled security tools
• Deployed BlackCat ransomware
• Engaged aggressive communications with victims for persuasion

Recent Attack 4 & 5 October & November 2023

• Purchased stolen credentials from cybercriminal market
• Targeted employees with phishing, including smishing and phone calls
• Harvested credentials through targeted AiTM phishing pages
• Used phone-based social engineering
• Distributed various RMM tools
• Used reverse shells
• Deployed commodity malware (infostealers, reconnaissance, privilege escalation)
• Targeted VMware vCenters servers using the open-source bedevil Linux rootkit
• Achieved privilege escalation by resetting password or modifying multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Performed reconnaissance and credential dump using public tools
• Enumerated the internal documentation and resources
• Disabled security products
• Modified mailbox rules to delete emails from security vendors, and exfiltrate emails
• Exfiltrated data using MEGAsync, Gofile, shz[.]al, Storj, Temp[.]sh, Paste[.]ee, Backblaze, and AWS S3 buckets
• Deployed BlackCat ransomware
• Engaged aggressive communications with victims for persuasion

Vulnerabilities

Scattered Spider is recognized for its exploitation of CVE-2015-2291, a vulnerability residing in the Intel Ethernet diagnostics driver for Windows (iqvw64.sys). This flaw enables local users to potentially trigger a denial of service or execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges by means of meticulously crafted IOCTL calls, specifically (a) 0x80862013, (b) 0x8086200B, (c) 0x8086200F, or (d) 0x80862007. To implement their scheme, Scattered Spider leveraged CVE-2015-2291 to introduce a malicious kernel driver within the Intel Ethernet diagnostics driver for Windows (iqvw64.sys).

In addition, Scattered Spider has exploited CVE-2021-35464, a vulnerability identified in the ForgeRock AM server. Versions of ForgeRock AM server preceding 7.0 were found to have a Java deserialization vulnerability associated with the jato.pageSession parameter across multiple pages. This exploitation does not necessitate authentication, and it can lead to remote code execution by dispatching a specifically crafted /ccversion/* request to the server. This vulnerability arises from the utilization of Sun ONE Application Framework (JATO) present in Java 8 or earlier versions. Scattered Spider harnessed CVE-2021-35464 to execute code and elevate their privileges on an AWS instance that utilized the Apache Tomcat user. This was achieved through the request and assumption of permissions corresponding to an instance role, facilitated by a compromised AWS token.

Origins and Affiliates:

As we mentioned, in April 2023, ALPHV (BlackCat) ransomware group used an updated version of POORTRY to compromise the US payments giant NCR, leading to an outage on its Aloha point of sale platform. This information may indicate that the scattered spider operations are in Eastern Europe.