British Scattered Spider Hacker Pleads Guilty in the US

Tyler Buchanan admitted in court to hacking into various companies, defrauding them, and stealing cryptocurrency from multiple individuals.

A British national has pleaded guilty in a US court to conspiracy to hack into the networks of dozens of companies and to stealing millions in cryptocurrency, the Department of Justice announced.

The man, Tyler Robert Buchanan, 24, of Dundee, Scotland, was arrested in June 2024 in Spain and was charged in the US in November 2024 for his role in the financially motivated hacking group Scattered Spider.

Buchanan admitted to conducting SMS phishing attacks, bombarding a victim company’s employees with hundreds of messages linking to phishing sites designed to harvest credentials and personally identifiable information (PII).

Using the stolen information, Buchanan and his co-conspirators accessed the employees’ accounts and the victim company’s systems, stealing sensitive information such as intellectual property, PII, credentials, and confidential documents.

They used a phishing ...