UK cops say arrest of two young hackers disrupted the operations of an infamous hacking group

U.K police said on Thursday that the jailing of two teenage hackers has “severely” hampered the activities of the infamous cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider.

Owen Flowers, 18, and Thalha Jubair, 20, pleaded guilty earlier this year to hacking Transport of London (TfL), the government body overseeing the U.K. capital’s public transit system in 2024. The two were sentenced to five years and six months in prison on Thursday. 

The jailing of Flowers and Jubair is a reminder that, sometimes, the most dangerous and effective hackers don’t work for sophisticated government agencies with millions of dollars of budget. More often, they are rather very young and smart hackers motivated by money and infamy among their peers.

Groups such as Scattered Spider, as well as ShinyHunters, another cybercriminal collective, often target and exploit employees and individuals rather than computer systems, a strategy that’s both effective and hard to counter.

While hacking groups’ members tend to come and go, the groups themselves can rebrand. But British authorities are convinced the jailing of Flowers and Jubair represents a significant blow to Scattered Spider, an amorphous group that’s been linked to dozens of high-profile attacks, such as those against casino giant MGM, airline WestJet, and cybersecurity firm Okta. These attacks in turn gave the hackers access to several of these companies customers. 

“Scattered Spider has been the most significant cybercrime threat to the U.K. in recent years. Through this investigation, we have severely disrupted that threat and brought key offenders to justice,” said Paul Foster, the head of the U.K. National Crime Agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit. 

The two hackers were behind the cyberattack against TfL in summer 2024, which took the system’s infrastructure offline, including the ticketing system, and the online real-time train arrival information system. The disruptions lasted for weeks.

Flowers and Jubair were arrested a year later. At the time, the FBI accused Jubair of being involved in attacks on more than 120 companies using social engineering tactics. 

Authorities said the attack against TfL resulted in losses of around £29 million (around $47 million). The two hackers had such deep access to TfL systems that they “could have shut out and shut down TfL completely,” and held “the keys to the kingdom” to the company’s systems, according to the Guardian.