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Retail hackers believed to be young and from US and UK, detectives say

The National Crime Agency tells the BBC how it is trying to find the culprits of the M&S and Co-op hacks.

"We are looking at the group that is publicly known as Scattered Spider, but we've got a range of different hypotheses and we'll follow the evidence to get to the offenders," Paul Foster, head of the NCA's national cyber crime unit, said in a new BBC documentary. "We know that Scattered Spider are largely English-speaking but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're in the UK - we know that they communicate online amongst themselves in a range of different platforms and channels, which is, I guess, key to their ability to then be able to operate as a collective," Mr Foster said. "Calling up IT help desks is a tactic that Scattered Spider seems to favour and they use social engineering techniques to manipulate someone into doing something like clicking on a link or resetting someone's account to a password they can use," Lisa Forte from cyber security firm Red Goat said.

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