The British ‘ringleader’ of the hacking group thought to be behind the M&S cyber attack fled his home after masked thugs burst in and threatened him with blowtorches.
Tyler Buchanan, 23, is the suspected boss of the Scattered Spider cyber gang who crippled the supermarket over Easter weekend, wiping hundreds of millions off its market value and leading to the suspension of online sales for more than a week.
The FBI claims Scattered Spider has cost the retail giant a fortune in lost revenue.
Buchanan allegedly went on the run after the masked group descended on his mother’s home in Dundee, Scotland, with lit blowtorches, demanding the passwords for his cryptocurrency accounts.
A neighbour last night said they had not seen him since the raid in February 2023.
They told The Sun a car turned up and four or five males ‘piled out’ before entering the house and threatening to burn Buchanan with the blowtorch if he refused to give them the information.
According to reports on encrypted messaging app Telegram, which Buchanan was known to frequent under the username ‘Tylerb’, a rival cyber gang hired the men to invade his home. The same accounts claimed that his mother was assaulted by the intruders.
He was arrested in Spain last summer, having travelled from London to Barcelona and then on to Palma, Mallorca.
Tyler Buchanan, who has been extradited to the US to face charges relating to his role in Scattered Spider, as a child
Buchanan seen being arrested by Spanish police after he fled to Mallorca following the raid on his mother’s home
He was about to fly to Naples when he was arrested at the airport and found to be in control of a cryptocurrency wallet totalling more than $26 million (£20million) in Bitcoin.
Deemed a flight risk, Buchanan was denied bail when he appeared in court in California at the end of March.
Assuming he has not been sitting on a laptop while awaiting extradition, he cannot, of course, be responsible for pushing the button on the M&S attack.
Scattered Spider is made up of around 1,000 teenagers and young men across the UK and the US and has been blamed for cyber attacks on other major companies.
While the M&S cyber attack is still being investigated, on Friday a group called DragonForce claimed it and its partners were behind this and similar attacks on Co-op and Harrods.
There was no mention of Scattered Spider by name but experts told the Mail this is not surprising and does not rule out Scattered Spider’s involvement.
In fact from the start, the expert view has been that the network worked with Dragonforce to hold the retailer to ransom.
To date six people are known to have been arrested and directly connected to previous activity of Scattered Spider in the last year.
M&S have faced stock issues following the cyber attack which has left many of their shelves empty since
More bare fridge shelves inside an M&S supermarket following the cyber attack which crippled the chain
Five of them have been charged and Buchanan is the only Briton. A second British teenager remains under investigation. In the US, authorities claim the gang perpetrated attacks on dozens of companies in the US, Canada, the UK and India in 2022.
It is alleged Buchanan stole £20million in cryptocurrency and customer’s private details and has been charged with wire fraud and identity theft by a California court.
Buchanan and four of his co-defendants are accused of tricking employees into sharing login details.
Victims were apparently told their crypto accounts would be closed and were directed to a legitimate-looking website where their coins vanished.
Buchanan and a music leaker from the US, Noah Urban, were arrested alongside three other Scattered Spider members last year in an FBI operation.
Urban, now 20, was unmasked as the teen hacker behind the early release of songs from Ariana Grande’s album Eternal Sunshine. Prosecutors claim to have linked his illegal activities to Buchanan.
