
09/10/2025
The new wave of digital insurgents: Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, ShinyHunters, now scattered lapsus$ hunters, operate less like organized syndicates and more like philosophical experiments in entropy. Methods of extortion, social engineering, SIM Swaps, and data leaks are flexing power in an age defined by surveillance and spectacle.
Arrests across the U.S., U.K., and Baltics have exposed a network responsible for over $100M in corporate intrusions, yet their true significance lies beyond financial damage. These actors merge cybercrime with accelerationist thought, adopting a posture of anti-ideological revolt, where chaos itself becomes a medium, and maximum damage, with maximum noise, and maximum profit becoming guiding motives.
Now joining forces with newly identified Crimson Collective, both group’s Telegram broadcasts echo Marinetti’s Futurist exaltation of aggression and velocity—but transposed into the digital domain, most recently against open-source software/ cloud infrastructure provider RedHat. Breaches and criminal acts have since become performance art. What links them is not loyalty or formal organization but a shared nihilist accelerationist impulse: to intensify collapse, to weaponize spectacle, to turn every system against itself, in the corporate domain, and sometimes IRL.
Beyond the showmanship, the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters are also sharing tools and techniques. They have advertised a range of exploits for sale or use, claiming to possess zero-day exploits for enterprise software. They also claim to be building supercharged ransomware-as-a-service targeting VMware instances at the kernel level, with potential for lease to affiliates. This may just be talking big, but the intent has been noted.
scattered lapsus$ hunters have regardless targeted critical infrastructure alongside airlines, retail giants, and transport networks like Transport for London using low-tech but deeply human tactics: voice phishing, impersonation, and psychological manipulation. In this way, they are decentralized, adaptive, and recursive, mirroring the systems they infiltrate. One thing is certain, these are not the hackers of ten or twenty years ago.