SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON, Sept 22 (Reuters) - About a year ago, the U.S. security firm Palo Alto Networks began to hear from a flurry of companies that had been hacked in ways that weren’t the norm for cybercriminals.

Known in the security industry variously as Scattered Spider, Muddled Libra, and UNC3944, these hackers were thrust into the limelight earlier this month for breaching the systems of two of the world’s largest gambling companies - MGM Resorts (MGM.N) and Caesars Entertainment Ltd (CZR.O).

From Canada to Japan, the security firm CrowdStrike has tracked 52 attacks globally by the group since March 2022, most of them in the United States, said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of threat intelligence at the company.

In some cases - Mandia did not say which ones - hackers tied to Scattered Spider placed bogus emergency calls to summon heavily armed police units to the homes of executives of targeted companies.

Before calling helpdesks, the hackers acquire employee information including passwords by social engineering, especially ‘SIM swapping’ - a technique where they trick a telecom company’s customer service representative to reassign a specific phone number from one device to another, analysts say.

“In some ways this is just like the age-old game of cat and mouse,” said Whitmore, who compared Scattered Spider to Lapsus$, another group behind previous hacks into Okta and the technology giant Microsoft.

Saved 74% of original text.