Four Arrested in £440M Cyber Attack on Marks & Spencer, Co-op, and Harrods

The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) on Thursday announced that four people have been arrested in connection with cyber attacks targeting major retailers Marks & Spencer, Co-op, and Harrods.

The arrested individuals include two men aged 19, a third aged 17, and a 20-year-old woman. They were apprehended in the West Midlands and London on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offenses, blackmail, money laundering, and participating in the activities of an organized crime group.

All four suspects were arrested from their homes and their electronic devices have been seized for further forensic analysis. Their names were not disclosed.

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“Since these attacks took place, specialist NCA cybercrime investigators have been working at pace and the investigation remains one of the Agency’s highest priorities,” Deputy Director Paul Foster, head of the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit, said in a statement.

“Today’s arrests are a significant step in that investigation but our work continues, alongside partners in the U.K. and overseas, to ensure those responsible are identified and brought to justice.”

According to the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC), the April 2025 cyber attacks targeting Marks & Spencer and Co-op have been classified as a “single combined cyber event” with a financial impact of anywhere between £270 million ($363 million) and £440 million ($592 million).

The NCA did not name the “organized crime group” the individuals are part of, but it’s believed that some of these attacks have been perpetrated by a decentralized cybercrime group called Scattered Spider, which is notorious for its advanced social engineering ploys to breach organizations and deploy ransomware.

“While ransomware is an ever-present threat, Scattered Spider represents a persistent and capable adversary whose operations have been historically effective even against organizations with mature security programs,” Grayson North, Senior Security Consultant at GuidePoint Security, told The Hacker News.

“The success of Scattered Spider is not exactly the result of any new or novel tactics, but rather their expertise in social engineering and willingness to be extremely persistent in attempting to gain initial access to their targets.”

The majority of individuals associated with the financially driven group are young, native English speakers which gives them an edge when attempting to gain trust with their targets by making fake calls to IT help desks posing as employees.

Scattered Spider is part of The Com, a larger loose-knit collective that’s responsible for a wide range of crimes, including social engineering, phishing, SIM swapping, extortion, sextortion, swatting, kidnapping, and murder.

“Scattered Spider demonstrates a calculated and opportunistic targeting strategy, rotating across industries and geographies based on visibility, payout potential, and operational heat,” Halcyon pointed out.

Google-owned Mandiant said Scattered Spider has a habit of focusing on a single sector at a time, while keeping their core tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) consistent. This includes setting up phishing domains that closely mimic legitimate corporate login portals and are designed to trick employees into revealing their credentials.

“This means that organizations can take proactive steps like training their help desk staff to enforce robust identity verification processes and deploying phishing-resistant MFA to defend against these intrusions,” said Charles Carmakal, CTO, Mandiant Consulting at Google Cloud.

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