Scattered Spider
British-American hacking group founded in 2022
Scattered Spider, also referred to as UNC3944 and more recently identified as ShinyHunters, is a hacking group mostly made up of teens and young adults believed to live in the United States and the United Kingdom. The group is believed to be affiliated with cybercriminal network "The Com", or more specifically "the Hacker Com", a subset of The Com.
The group gained notoriety for their involvement in the hacking and extortion of Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International, two of the largest casino and gambling companies in the United States. Scattered Spider has also targeted Visa, Marks & Spencer, PNC Financial Services, Transamerica, New York Life Insurance, Synchrony Financial, Truist Bank, Twilio, and JLR.
Members of Scattered Spider have been connected with the hacks against Snowflake cloud storage customers in the US. More recently, members of Scattered Spider have been connected with the hacks against Qantas, the flag carrier of Australia.
A collective of cybercrime groups, including Scattered Spider, Lapsus$ and ShinyHunters was forged in 2025, and has created at least 16 Telegram channels since August 8, 2025.
Names
The group's most common name as used in press releases and by journalists is Scattered Spider, though many other names have been attributed to the group. Star Fraud, Octo Tempest, Scatter Swine, and Muddled Libra have all been names used to refer to the group previously.
Scattered Spider is a component of a larger global hacking community, known as "The Community" or "The Com", itself having members who have hacked major American technology companies.
History
Scattered Spider is believed to have been founded in May 2022, when the group was focused on attacks on telecommunications firms. The group utilized SIM swap scams, multi-factor authentication fatigue attacks, and phishing by SMS and Telegram.
“Scattered Spider” enters the record as british-American hacking group founded in 2022. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Scattered, Spider and British-American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q122864598. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scattered Spider” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.