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Scattered Spider

Scattered Spider: Impersonation, and Cybersecurity in the Age of Cloud Computing

By Skeeter Wesinger
June 29, 2025

In an era where companies have moved their infrastructure to the cloud and outsourced much of their IT, one old-fashioned tactic still defeats the most modern defenses: impersonation.
At the center of this threat is Scattered Spider, a cybercriminal collective that doesn’t exploit code—they exploit people. Their operations are quiet, persuasive, and dangerously effective. Instead of smashing through firewalls, they impersonate trusted employees—often convincingly enough to fool help desks, bypass multi-factor authentication, and gain access to critical systems without ever tripping an alarm.
This is the cybersecurity challenge of our time. Not ransomware. Not zero-days. But trust itself.
Who Is Scattered Spider?
Known to threat intelligence teams as UNC3944, Muddled Libra, or 0ktapus, Scattered Spider is an English-speaking group that has compromised some of the most security-aware companies in North America. Their breaches at MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment made headlines—not because they used sophisticated malware, but because they didn’t have to.
Their weapon of choice is the phone call. A help desk technician receives a request from someone claiming to be a senior executive who lost their device. The impersonator is articulate, knowledgeable, and urgent. They know internal jargon. They cite real names. Sometimes, they even use AI-generated voices.
And too often, it works. The attacker gets a password reset, reroutes MFA codes, and slips in undetected.
The Illusion of Familiarity
What makes these attackers so dangerous is their ability to sound familiar. They don’t just say the right things—they say them the right way. They mirror internal language. They speak with confidence. They understand hierarchy. They’re skilled impersonators, and they prey on a simple reflex: the desire to help.
In the past, we might have trusted our ears. “It sounded like them,” someone might say.
But in the age of AI, “sounding like them” is no longer proof of identity. It’s a liability.
When Cloud Isn’t the Cure
Many organizations have moved to cloud-based environments under the assumption that centralization and managed services will reduce their exposure. In some ways, they’re right: the cloud simplifies infrastructure and offloads security operations. But here’s the truth: you can’t outsource responsibility. The human layer remains—and that’s precisely where Scattered Spider operates.
They don’t need to breach Azure or AWS. They just need to impersonate someone with access to it.
It’s time we stop treating “trust but verify” as a cliché and start treating it as operational policy. Better yet: trust—but always verify. Every request. Every reset. Every exception.
Verification today means more than checking a box. It requires multi-channel authentication. It means never resetting MFA or passwords based solely on a phone call, no matter how credible the caller seems. It means locking down help desk protocols so impersonation doesn’t slip through the cracks.
Security teams must also monitor legitimate tools—like AnyDesk, TeamViewer, and ScreenConnect—that attackers often use once inside. These aren’t inherently malicious, but in the wrong hands, they’re devastating.
And above all, organizations must train their frontline personnel—especially support staff—to treat every identity request with healthy skepticism. If your instinct says something feels off, pause and verify through secure channels. Escalate. Slow down. Ask the questions attackers hope you won’t.
Scattered Spider doesn’t hack your servers. They hack your systems of trust. They bypass encryption by impersonating authority. And they exploit the one vulnerability no software can patch: assumption.
As we continue shifting toward remote work, outsourced IT, and cloud-based everything, the real threat isn’t technical—it’s personal. It’s the voice on the line. The urgent request. The person who “sounds right.”
In this world, cybersecurity isn’t just about what you build. It’s about what you believe—and what you’re willing to question.
Therefore, you have to train your teams. Harden your protocols. And remember in the age of the cloud, the most important firewall is still human.
Trust—but always verify!

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The New Cold War Is No Longer a Theory

The New Cold War Is No Longer a Theory—It’s Airborne

By Skeeter Wesinger
June 16, 2025

“The great conflicts of history do not always announce themselves with declarations of war. Sometimes they slip quietly onto a runway in the dead of night, transponders off.”

In an era of satellites, signal intelligence, and open-source surveillance, it’s rare for a global superpower to move undetected. So, when a Chinese cargo aircraft slipped silently into Iranian airspace, its transponder disabled and its mission classified, it wasn’t just a mystery—it was a message. A coded communiqué to Washington, to Tel Aviv, and to anyone else watching closely: The New Cold War is real, and the lines are being drawn.

No Longer Just Iran and Israel

The conflict that began as yet another volatile flashpoint between Iran and Israel is rapidly mutating. The sudden, unverified—but deeply credible—report of a Chinese aircraft secretly delivering “strategic cargo” to Tehran has thrown fuel on the already smoldering fire. The fact that the flight’s transponder was off is not just a technical note—it’s an act of deliberate concealment, a violation of international air protocol usually reserved for acts of war, espionage, or arms delivery.

In the old Cold War, the world was divided along a single axis: Washington versus Moscow. Today’s alignment is more fluid, but just as dangerous. It is no longer a two-player chessboard. It’s a three-dimensional battlefield of cyber proxies, energy corridors, and ideological spheres. And in that contest, China just stepped out of the shadows.

Why Would China Choose Now?

Timing is never accidental in geopolitics. This move comes just as U.S. and Israeli forces are executing airstrikes on Iranian infrastructure—strikes that have reportedly killed senior nuclear scientists and disabled key facilities in Natanz and Isfahan. By choosing this moment to intervene, however quietly, Beijing is not just signaling support for Iran. It is challenging the very architecture of Western deterrence.
And it is not unprecedented. For years, China has expanded its strategic partnerships in the Middle East through infrastructure projects, energy deals, and joint military exercises with both Iran and Saudi Arabia. But this is different. This is not diplomacy. This is movement of materiel under the cover of silence.

Who’s Taking Sides?

Like the proxy wars of the 20th century, the sides are forming—some loudly, others with calibrated ambiguity:

• China is backing Iran quietly but unmistakably—through oil purchases, drone technology, cyber cooperation, and possibly now, arms delivery.
• Russia, already aligned with Iran in Syria and hardened by its own war in Ukraine, is likely complicit or at least informed.
• The United States, long Israel’s security patron, is being forced into a reactive posture—issuing vague warnings, watching red lines blur.
• Israel, ever aggressive and cornered, has no margin for error. Its F-35 strikes and retaliatory doctrine may now risk wider war.

And then there are the others. The Gulf states, wary of Iran but weary of chaos. Turkey, straddling NATO ties and Eastern ambitions. The EU, whispering peace but unwilling to pay its price. Each is being pulled toward a pole of influence—either by oil, ideology, or the allure of protection.

What’s Being Delivered? And What’s at Stake?

We may never know exactly what that Chinese cargo plane carried. Was it missile components? Electronic warfare gear? A quantum-encrypted communications hub? Or perhaps something more symbolic—proof that the East is now willing to enter the Western hemisphere of influence not with trade, but with leverage.
And that is what this new Cold War is truly about: not territory, but control of the narrative, the infrastructure, and the future of power itself.
What’s emerging isn’t a singular confrontation, but a latticework of quiet escalations. A missile strike here. A silent aircraft is there. An AI blackout in a foreign grid. The battlefield is now global—and often invisible.

Conclusion: A Shadow Conflict in Plain Sight

The old Cold War ended not with victory parades but with archives released years later. The new one may never declare itself openly. But it doesn’t need to.
When cargo planes fly dark into Tehran, when nuclear scientists are killed by hypersonic drones, and when world leaders speak of “territorial integrity” while flying weapons into contested zones, we are not watching peace unravel. We are watching a new order take shape—one where surveillance is constant, trust is rare, and the next flashpoint could arrive with a ping, not a bang.

As in the 1930s, the alliances are still forming, the weapons still being positioned. But history reminds us that by the time the first shot is noticed, the war has already begun.

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Burning the Future

Burning the Future: Why Waymo Robotaxis Are Being Targeted in Los Angeles

By Skeeter Wesinger
June 11, 2025

The future is burning in Los Angeles—and it’s driving itself into the flames.
In recent weeks, autonomous vehicles operated by Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving subsidiary, have become a flashpoint in the city’s ongoing social unrest. What began as scattered protests against housing inequality and police overreach has turned sharply against the most visible emblem of Silicon Valley’s quiet conquest of urban life: the driverless car.
Waymo’s robotaxis—sleek, sensor-laden electric vehicles that glide through city streets with no one at the wheel—have been set on fire, spray-painted, disabled, and blocked. In some cases, protesters jumped on their hoods. In one instance, the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery ignited, blanketing an intersection in black smoke and toxic fumes. Five cars were torched in a single night near the Beverly Center. Waymo has since suspended service in key areas.
Why Waymo? Why now?

A Rolling Surveillance State
Part of the answer lies in optics. A Waymo car looks like what it is: a surveillance platform in motion. Packed with LiDAR, radar, and 360-degree cameras, each vehicle is effectively a roving sensor array collecting vast troves of visual and environmental data. Protesters increasingly believe that Waymo footage is being shared—or could be shared—with law enforcement. That makes the robotaxi a surveillance threat, especially in communities already skeptical of over-policing and state monitoring.
In an age when public space is contested ground, a driverless car is not just an anomaly—it’s a trespasser.

Automation as Class War
But the backlash isn’t only about privacy. For many in Los Angeles, Waymo represents something even more existential: job loss at the altar of automation.
The city’s economy still depends on tens of thousands of human drivers—Uber, Lyft, taxis, delivery vans, and commercial transport. Waymo’s expansion signals a not-so-distant future in which those workers are rendered obsolete. That future is arriving without public input, without protections, and with little concern for who gets left behind. The Teamsters and the LA County Federation of Labor have protested Waymo’s rollout since 2023. Their warnings are now finding a wider audience, and a louder voice.
If you’re looking for a symbol of job displacement and unaccountable tech governance, you won’t find a better target than a car that drives itself and costs a man his living.

Tech as the Face of Gentrification
There’s also the unavoidable truth that Waymo vehicles are highly visible in neighborhoods already under pressure from gentrification. The sleek, whirring robotaxis feel alien, indifferent—like emissaries of a world that values efficiency over community, and sensors over people. For longtime residents, they are reminders of a city being hollowed out, algorithm by algorithm, until only the surface remains.
In this context, setting a Waymo car on fire is not just an act of destruction. It is a political statement.

Spectacle and Strategy
And then there’s the media effect. A burning Waymo is headline gold. It’s instantly legible as a rejection of Big Tech, of automation, of surveillance, of the inequality that comes when luxury innovation is layered on top of public neglect. Images of charred autonomous vehicles make the evening news, circulate on social media, and galvanize protestors elsewhere.
It’s not unlike what the Luddites did in the 19th century—targeting the machines that symbolized their displacement. Only now the machine drives itself and livestreams the revolution.

A Dangerous Road Ahead
Waymo’s executives are right to be concerned. What’s being targeted isn’t just a brand—it’s a future that many people were never asked to vote on. One where machines replace people, where public spaces are privately surveilled, and where “innovation” often means exclusion.
The destruction of these vehicles may be unlawful, but the message is clear: you can’t automate your way out of accountability.
Until the tech industry confronts this unrest not with PR statements but with real dialogue, real reform, and a real respect for the communities it drives through, the streets will remain dangerous, not just for Waymos but for any vision of the future that forgets the people in the present.

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McKinsey Has a Bot for That

How AI is quietly taking over the consulting industry—from slide decks to strategy sessions.

By Skeeter Wesinger
June 10, 2025

Let’s say you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You’ve just paid McKinsey a few million dollars to help streamline your supply chain or finesse your M&A pitch. What you may not know is that some of that brainpower now comes from a machine.

McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group—the Big Three of strategy consulting—have embraced artificial intelligence not just as a service they sell, but as a co-worker. At McKinsey, a proprietary AI platform now drafts proposals, generates PowerPoint decks, and even outlines market entry strategies. That used to be a junior analyst’s job. Now it’s done in seconds by software.

The firm insists this is progress, not replacement. “Our people will be doing the things that are more valuable to our clients,” a McKinsey spokesperson told the Financial Times.¹ It’s the kind of line that sounds better in a press release than in a staff meeting.

Meanwhile, Bain & Company has rolled out a custom chat interface powered by OpenAI.² It’s more than just a chatbot—it’s a digital consigliere that surfaces insights, runs simulations, and drafts client memos with GPT-powered fluency. Over at Boston Consulting Group, AI-driven engagements already make up 20 percent of the firm’s total revenue.³ That’s not a rounding error—it’s a shift in the business model.

This Isn’t Just Efficiency. It’s a Redefinition.

AI doesn’t sleep, bill overtime, or ask for a promotion. It digests case studies, slurps up real-time market data, and spins out “insights” at breakneck speed. A proposal that once took two weeks now gets turned around in two hours. A slide deck that required a team of Ivy Leaguers is built by algorithms trained on millions of prior decks.

That’s the efficiency part. But the real story is what happens next.

Strategy consulting has always sold scarcity—the idea that elite firms offered unique, human insight. But what happens when AI systems trained on decades of reports can replicate that thinking, and maybe even improve on it?

“Empathy,” the firms say. “Judgment.” “Relationship building.” Those are the buzzwords that now define human value in consulting. If the machine can do the math, the humans must do the trust. It’s a plausible pivot—until clients bring their own AI to the table.

The Consultants Are Pivoting—Fast

McKinsey and its rivals aren’t fighting the change—they’re monetizing it. They’re building internal tools while also selling AI implementation strategies to clients. In effect, they’re profiting twice: first by automating their own work, then by teaching others how to do the same.

This is the classic consulting playbook—turn a threat into a line item.

But beneath the slideware optimism is an existential question. If your AI builds the deck, drafts the strategy, and even suggests the pricing model, what exactly are you buying from a consultant?

Maybe it’s still the name on the invoice. Maybe it’s the assurance that someone—some human—stands behind the recommendation. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the beginning of a new normal: where the smartest person in the room isn’t a person at all.

Citations

  1. Mark Marcellis, “McKinsey’s AI Revolution Has Begun,” Financial Times, May 29, 2025. https://www.ft.com/content/mckinsey-ai-presentation-tools
  2. Derek Thompson, “How Bain Is Using OpenAI to Redefine Consulting,” The Atlantic, March 12, 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/bain-openai-strategy
  3. David Gelles, “At BCG, AI Consulting Now Drives 20% of Revenue,” The New York Times, April 10, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/business/bcg-ai-revenue-growth
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