The US Department of Justice on Thursday has excluded federal charges against British teenager Thalha Jubair, who are accused of being involved in at least 120 cyberattacks, including the US System of Courts and blackmail.
Jubair, 19 years old, was arrested on Tuesday at his home in eastern London, according to one statement from the National Crime Service. He appeared in court on Thursday morning in London alongside another teenager, Owen Flowers, 18. Both are charged with participating in a 2024 Cyberettack targeting London, the government’s body supervising the London Public Transit System. A monthly recovery attempt.
The National Criminal Service said the hack in the IT network of the London Transit System was attributed to the scattered Hacking Spider team.
Both Jubair and flowers were detained to appear in court later, per BBC news.
The scattered spider is an English -language group of economic motives of cyberspace, mainly teenagers and young adults, who are sometimes referred to as “advanced adolescents” for their specialized and repetitive cyberspace. These hackers are known for their ability to hack in a large number of companies often using relatively simple social engineering techniques, such as the call of It Helpdesk who is pretending to be an employee who forgot their password and now needs a new one.
These hackers are also known for their involvement with other hackers through a cloudy Cyber ​​Collective called “The com,” Referring to the cybercrime community that sometimes crosses the real world using natural threats and violence, including swatting.
Federal charges for targeting US companies
As part of a separate set of federal charges Posted to New Jersey, US prosecutors said Jubair is also facing charges, blackmail and money laundering in relation to dozens of halls that saw corporate victims pay more than $ 115 million in ransom payments.
In his criminal complaint, The FBI said that in July 2024 it occupied servers who believe they were run by Jubair and found that Jubair was allegedly involved in at least 120 companies, including 47 companies in the United States.
According to prosecutors, Jubair used social engineering techniques to break the company’s networks to steal internal data, encrypt the victim’s servers, then eliminate the victims to pay hackers to unlock the files.
One of the victim companies included a critical infrastructure company based in New Jersey. The FBI said it found data on one of the servers allegedly run by Jubair, which included more than a gigabyte of data stolen by the critical infrastructure company, as well as the browsing history that showed obvious data on the recording of the critical infrastructure company.
Another violation of the FBI allegedly nailed to Jubair also included access to the US court system.
In January 2025, Jubair and the other hackers allegedly contacted US Helpdesk to access three user accounts, including a federal judge of the judge, to search for information about “scattered spider”.
Hackers have also used one of the accounts that have been disturbed to submit a request to disclose an emergency information of customers ‘information to an anonymous financial service provider, a common tactic used by hackers to deceive companies to convert users’ information in response to what they believe.
The FBI said the confiscated Jubair server “was used to carry out searches” associated with the US Hack Court and used to send an emergency request to the financial company.
Parachute Was first reported in August that scattered spider hackers broke into the US court system to search for information about hackers, including a sealed indictment of a now-restored member of the scattered spider, Noah bourgeois.
Jubair’s servers reportedly contained a encryption wallet that stores about $ 36 million at a time when it was seized, largely detectors to the companies paid by the ransom, according to the FBI. But the FBI said Jubair was reportedly transferred about $ 8.4 million from the wallet, as the FBI took control of the server.
It is not immediately clear whether the Ministry of Justice has or will seek the Jubair issue and a DOJ spokesman did not comment immediately.
