An attack that knocked out systems for MGM Resorts International in the United States was traced to a cybercrime group with expertise in spoofing and malware.NThis organization, dubbed “Scattered Spider” by security analysts, makes bogus calls to businesses in an attempt to “phish” for sensitive information such as user names and passwords.
According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, it has targeted MGM and hundreds of other Western corporations in an attempt to extort ransom payments. One of the persons said that after detecting the breach on Sunday, the operator of hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, which includes the Bellagio, Aria, Cosmopolitan, and Excalibur, took down substantial areas of its internal networks as a precaution.
The endeavor to stop the hackers from spreading prompted panic. Key cards for thousands of hotel rooms stopped working, slot machines stopped dispensing money, and computerized payouts were sluggish. MGM did not provide any feedback after being asked.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board said in a statement that the FBI had alerted them of the breach and that Governor Joe Lombardo had coordinated with local and federal law enforcement.
According to Charles Carmakal, chief technical officer at Mandiant, a Google-owned cyber security firm, Scattered Spider is a relatively recent entrant in the ransomware sector and has attacked at least 100 organizations, most of them in the US and Canada, in the two years that Mandiant has been following it.
“They are very active, very disruptive, and causing chaos and do a good job of breaking in and causing a lot of pain,” he said. In the multimillion-dollar ransomware market, which relies on software attacks to encrypt or steal data and collect ransoms, Scattered Spider stands out as a leader among Russian-speaking cybercrime groups.
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The group uses what it learns from social media profiles to pose as targets, calling them in English to try to extract sensitive information such as passwords or digital codes. Carmakal speculated that the group’s members were based in the United Kingdom or continental Europe. He explained, “They’re successful because they’re very good at research and have good skills.”
Steve Stone, CEO of rival cyber security firm Rubrik Zero Labs, said that at a large organization like MGM with thousands of employees and multiple overlapping networks, shutting down some internal activities to contain the compromise would be a normal method. He explained that the hotel’s check-in and banking systems had been designed to automatically trust one another.
“Given the widespread challenge MGM is having, it seems there’s a lot of trust built into their environments,” Stone said. “That makes for a highly efficient business until there’s a problem — and that strength is now your weakness.”
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