You’ve heard the name. If you haven’t yet, you will.

Scattered Spider is the most dangerous ransomware group you’ve never seen coming. Why? Because they don’t break in. They get buzzed in—by your own people.

They’re fluent in your helpdesk protocols, your MFA workflows, your cloud dashboard layout. And in the last year alone, they’ve taken down some of the world’s biggest brands—from MGM Resorts to Caesars to Marks & Spencer—without writing a single exploit.

Let’s look at how they operate, why traditional defenses keep failing, and how Konvergence’s zero-layer architecture would have short-circuited their playbook from step one.

Who is Scattered Spider?

Scattered Spider (also known as UNC3944, Octo Tempest, or Muddled Libra) is an advanced persistent threat group made up mostly of young, English-speaking hackers in the U.S. and U.K. They’re a hybrid of social engineers, SIM swappers, and access brokers. Many are believed to be under 25.

They came to fame through attacks on:

• MGM Resorts (2023) – Used impersonation and social engineering to take down hotel and casino operations across the U.S.

• Caesars Entertainment (2023) – Breach led to a $15M ransom payout to avoid a data leak.

• Marks & Spencer (2025) – Disrupted one of the UK’s largest retailers, causing massive losses in supply chain and online operations.

They specialize in human-side compromise: phishing, MFA fatigue, telecom manipulation, and helpdesk impersonation.

How They Get In: The Scattered Spider Playbook

1. Recon and Target Modeling

They study LinkedIn, GitHub, and public documentation. They map your team structure, tech stack, and internal language. They might even grab your support scripts from old job posts.

2. Initial Contact: Phishing and Impersonation

They’ll send a fake login page to your employees. Or call the helpdesk pretending to be the head of IT locked out of an account. It sounds simple. But it works.

3. MFA Bypass

If you're using push notifications, they’ll flood employees with requests until one is accidentally approved. Or they'll SIM swap and intercept the SMS code. Or call support and reset it entirely.

4. Lateral Movement

Once inside, they pivot across services using shared tools, exposed DNS, and over-permissioned admin accounts. They find backups, billing systems, SaaS apps, even HR data.

5. Payload Deployment

They might drop ransomware. But they don’t always need to. Sometimes, just stealing the data and selling access is enough. When they do deploy ransomware, it’s often in partnership with other groups like ALPHV.

Why They Keep Winning

It’s not because they’re better hackers. It’s because your architecture lets them act like insiders.

1. You trust DNS: They map your network from public and internal records.

2. You trust usernames: They impersonate someone and reset the password.

3. You trust push-based MFA: They exploit fatigue or reset the phone number.

4. You trust lateral movement: They compromise one service and get access to others.

5. You trust logs: They delete them.

It’s not a matter of patching faster. It’s that the entire model assumes trust where there should be proof.

How Konvergence Changes the Rules

Let’s be clear: Konvergence doesn’t patch these holes. It closes them for good.

Identity That Requires Proof, Not Behavior

In Konvergence, every user, device, and service must cryptographically prove who they are before anything happens. No calls to the helpdesk can override it. No phishing link can bypass it. There’s no “approve” button—just signed, validated packets.

No DNS = No Map to Follow

Service discovery happens over encrypted, peer-authenticated channels. DNS? Gone. Attackers can’t scan, pivot, or enumerate what doesn’t exist.

Every Service is Segmented by Default

There’s no “inside” the network. Each service lives in its own trust zone. Even if a bad actor gets in, they’re stuck. There’s nothing to move laterally to—unless they cryptographically prove access.

Merkle Clock Rollbacks Stop Attacks Cold

Any state change is recorded in a tamper-proof Merkle Clock. If ransomware encrypts files or changes permissions, the node rolls back to its last good state—without alert fatigue or analyst intervention.

Immutable Logs. Unforgivable Forgery.

Logs are written to append-only structures that can’t be altered. No more disappearing audit trails. No more retroactive editing. Everything is transparent, provable, and permanent.

What is Konvergence?

Konvergence is a zero-layer backend that replaces legacy stack assumptions with cryptographic enforcement.

Instead of building walls around apps, it embeds verification into every request, service, and interaction. Think:

1. Peer-authenticated service graphs instead of firewalls

2. Signed identity workflows instead of username-password schemes

3. Encrypted personal clouds instead of centralized databases

4. Autonomous rollback instead of alerts and triage

It’s not just infrastructure. It’s infrastructure that enforces reality.

The core is Archimedes, a modular, identity-first system that replaces legacy IAM, DNS, and middleware with cryptographically sound interactions. It’s designed to operate in environments where attacks are constant and speed is critical.

With Konvergence, there is no trust without proof.

Why This Matters Now

Scattered Spider isn’t going away. Their attacks are faster, cheaper, and more human than ever. You won’t stop them with more phishing training or EDR alerts. You stop them by redesigning the environment they exploit.

That means:

1. No fallback passwords

2. No reset workflows based on voice calls

3. No access without cryptographic proof

4. No shared control planes

Every time you hear about a breach from Scattered Spider, ask yourself: Did the attacker find a flaw, or just use the system the way it was designed?

With Konvergence, that system is no longer usable by attackers—because it won’t run unless every request, every packet, every actorproves they belong.

Want to see what this looks like in practice? Start with a zero-layer audit at konvergenceinc.com