U.S. Charges Suspected Scattered Spider Member Over Cyber Intrusions

Federal authorities charged 19-year-old Peter Stokes (aka "Bouquet") for his role in Scattered Spider/Octo Tempest, a group of mainly teenagers and young adults that used advanced social-engineering to target enterprise IT help desks, reset MFA, compromise high-privilege administrator accounts, and exfiltrate data for extortion; a May 2025 intrusion of a major luxury retailer allegedly resulted in ~100 GB of stolen data and an $8 million ransom demand, with the victim incurring over $2 million in disruption and remediation costs, and Stokes was arrested in Helsinki pending extradition to Chicago.