About the Co Author

Alex Waintraub is the Founder of Waintraub Cyber Solutions, where he guides organizations through both proactive preparation and rapid response to cybersecurity incidents. With nearly 15 years of hands-on experience in digital forensics, threat intelligence, and ransomware negotiation, Alex has led crisis response efforts across sectors including healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and aviation. He previously served as Director of Incident Response at Arete and is a frequent speaker at major industry conferences such as RSA Conference and IT Nation Connect.
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Setting the Stage

C2 Corner exists to turn real‑world incidents into practical playbooks. When Alex called to compare notes on the recent airline breaches linked to Scattered Spider, it was clear this story was bigger than just another headline. It is a case study in how fast social engineers can leapfrog traditional defenses and how quickly defenders must evolve. What follows blends Alex’s DFIR field notes with my own perspective on what organizations need to change now.
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How Scattered Spider Slips Past the Front Door

Scattered Spider is an aggressive, social engineering-focused threat group linked to high-profile breaches at MGM Resorts, Caesars and several major airlines. Known for using live voice phishing and identity pivoting rather than malware, they target identity infrastructure directly and move fast.  

They pick up the phone, impersonate your admin, and convince your help desk to reset multifactor authentication. From there they pivot across identity platforms, cloud consoles, and collaboration tools while monitoring your own response chats. In one investigation Alex led, Scattered Spider moved from a single service account to Active Directory, CyberArk, and cloud backups in hours, showing an uncanny grasp of internal topology.

Why airlines? Airlines became a natural target for Scattered Spider not only because of data value, but due to sprawling vendor ecosystems. Loyalty programs, support contractors, and federated identity setups made it easy to impersonate a trusted link in the chain, and hard for defenders to detect the pivot in time. Trust chains are long, vendor ecosystems are sprawling, and loyalty data is lucrative. The MGM playbook (exploit human trust, not zero days) translated perfectly to aviation service vendors.
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What Broke: Legacy SIEMs and Stale Playbooks

Traditional SIEMs struggled here for three reasons:

• Static rules: They flag brute force but miss a rapid MFA reset followed by lateral movement.
• ‍Latency: Delayed ingestion turns real‑time attacks into slow motion reruns. By the time data shows up, attackers have already moved on.  
• ‍Context gaps: Anomalous login alerts live in silos, never linked to simultaneous Slack permission changes or sudden outbound file transfers.
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Four DFIR Takeaways

• Help desk is your new perimeter. Your help desk is now part of your attack surface. Treat voice and chat verification with the same rigor as firewall rules.
• ‍Context beats collection. EDR, Okta, and VPN logs are table stakes, but they’re not enough. Correlating identity, device, cloud, and SaaS logs (like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365) is what actually helps teams catch lateral movement.  
• ‍Ransom isn’t always the main objective. Many campaigns focus on exfiltration and pressure, not encryption.
• ‍Preparedness over heroics. Tabletop scenarios must cover MFA fatigue, voice phishing, and cloud pivoting. If your plan starts at the moment of containment, you are already behind.  
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My Take: Turning Lessons into Modern Detection

At Abstract Security we designed Lake Villa and our real‑time pipelines for exactly this style of adversary. Three principles matter:

• Identity‑centric correlation in seconds. A help desk initiated MFA reset tied to a new Slack token and unusual S3 access triggers a single high fidelity alert.
• ‍Streaming enrichment at ingest. User role, asset criticality, and threat intel attach to every event before it lands in storage, shrinking dwell time.
• ‍Workflow ready context. The same enriched alert feeds SOAR, not just dashboards, so responders can lock accounts or revoke sessions with one click.

When teams replace or augment their legacy SIEM with a pipeline plus Lake Villa analytics, they close the time gap that Scattered Spider exploits. Detection shifts from “after the fact” to “while the actor is still dialing the next help desk agent.”

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Closing Thought

Scattered Spider is already iterating on its next playbook. Our edge comes from iterating faster. Modern detection is no longer about amassing more logs; it is about weaving every human and machine action into a living storyline and surfacing the twist before the breach becomes tomorrow’s headline.