According to Vegas attorneys, a contributor to the closest thing you may see to Ocean’s Eleven in your lifetime is about to get off easy. A 17-year-old accused of contributing to a 2023 cyberattack against multiple Las Vegas casinos has been released to his parents on bail, while prosecutors allege he is still holding $1.8 million in ransomed cryptocurrency they have yet been unable to locate.
Between August and October 2023, multiple casinos owned by MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment were hit in a massive cyberattack, attributed to Scattered Spider. The black-hat hacking collective made up primarily of English-speaking teens and young adults, cost the casinos over $100 million in damages and received a $15 million paid ransom from Caesars.
The suspect released this week surrendered himself to local police in Nevada last week, much to the shock of police and researchers. “I wasn’t previously aware of a local [resident] that assisted with that hack,” said cybersecurity researcher Allison Nixon in regards to the arrest. The choice of the young man to surrender himself came one day after a pair of arrests in the UK were made of other alleged Scattered Spider contributors.
Scattered Spider’s “sophisticated network intrusions”, as described by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, were done with the use of BlackCat ransomware, a subscription-based ransomware service written in the Rust programming language. BlackCat attacks typically rely on exposing confidential victim data exfiltrated with social engineering tactics, then threatening to spread the data and execute DDoS attacks on the victim’s network.
The Clark County District Attorney’s office accuses the Vegas teen of secretly holding $1.8 million in Bitcoin from the heist that has not yet been recovered. The office is also attempting to try the teen, who would have been 15 years old at the time of the attacks, as an adult for harsher sentencing and possible prison time.
A family court judge found in favor of the boy’s defense, releasing him into the custody of his parents. The youth is not permitted to leave Clark County or live outside of his parents’ registered address, and has had his Internet and cell phone usage significantly restricted to educational purposes only. The boy faces a small list of charges including extortion and conspiracy to commit extortion, but if prosecutors get their wish, he may face much harsher charges as well.
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