At the recent SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence Summit, two CrowdStrike cybersecurity leads, Senior Security Researcher Sergei Frankoff and Senior Intelligence Analyst Eric Loui, offered details on an emerging major ransomware actor they call Sprite Spider. Like many other ransomware attackers, the gang behind Sprite Spider’s attacks has grown rapidly in sophistication and damage capacity since 2015.

Today Sprite Spider is poised to become one of the biggest ransomware threat actors of 2021 and has a threat profile on par with what advanced persistent threat actors were five or ten years ago. Sprite Spider’s rise as a sophisticated threat is not surprising given that it, like many other organized ransomware gangs are filled with hackers who are often gainfully employed by nation-state threat actors.