A notorious hacker group is now targeting the aviation industry, the FBI says
Scattered Spider gained attention in 2023 for hacking both MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment within a week of each other.
"These actors rely on social engineering techniques, often impersonating employees or contractors to deceive IT help desks into granting access," the FBI said on X. "These techniques frequently involve methods to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), such as convincing help desk services to add unauthorized MFA devices to compromised accounts."
The FBI said the group is focused on large corporations and their third-party IT providers, so "anyone in the airline ecosystem, including trusted vendors and contractors, could be at risk."
"Once inside, Scattered Spider actors steal sensitive data for extortion and often deploy ransomware," the agency said.
The FBI did not indicate that the actions affect airline safety.
Charles Carmakal, the chief technology officer at Google's Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm and subsidiary of Google Cloud, said on LinkedIn that the firm was "aware of multiple incidents in the airline and transportation sector which resemble the operations of UNC3944 or Scattered Spider."
"We recommend that the industry immediately take steps to tighten up their help desk identity verification processes prior to adding new phone numbers to employee/contractor accounts (which can be used by the threat actor to perform self-service password resets), reset passwords, add devices to MFA solutions, or provide employee information (e.g. employee IDs) that could be used for a subsequent social engineering attacks," he said.
Unit 42, a cybersecurity threat research team that is part of the larger Palo Alto Networks cybersecurity corporation, said it also observed Scattered Spider targeting the aviation industry.
"Organizations should be on high alert for sophisticated and targeted social engineering attacks and suspicious MFA reset requests," Sam Rubin, senior vice president of consulting and threat intelligence for Unit 42, said on LinkedIn on Friday.
Canada's WestJet announced earlier this month that it had uncovered a "cybersecurity incident involving internal systems and the WestJet app, which has restricted access for several users." A spokesperson told Business Insider the company has made "significant progress" regarding the matter, and investigations were ongoing.
Hawaiian Airlines also said on Thursday that it experienced a "cybersecurity event" that affected some of its IT systems.
"We continue to safely operate our full flight schedule, and guest travel is not impacted," the company said in a press release.
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