How Microsoft names threat actors

Microsoft uses a naming taxonomy for threat actors aligned with the theme of weather. We intend to bring better clarity to customers and other security researchers with this taxonomy. We offer a more organized, articulate, and easy way to reference threat actors so that organizations can better prioritize and protect themselves. We also aim to aid security researchers, who are already confronted with an overwhelming amount of threat intelligence data.

Microsoft categorizes threat actors into five key groups:

Nation-state actors: cyber operators acting on behalf of or directed by a nation/state-aligned program, irrespective of whether for espionage, financial gain, or retribution. Microsoft observed that most nation state actors continue to focus operations and attacks on government agencies, intergovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and think tanks for traditional espionage or surveillance objectives.

Financially motivated actors: cyber campaigns/groups directed by a criminal organization/person with motivations of financial gain and aren't associated with high confidence to a known non-nation state or commercial entity. This category includes ransomware operators, business email compromise, phishing, and other groups with purely financial or extortion motivations.

Private sector offensive actors (PSOAs): cyber activity led by commercial actors that are known/legitimate legal entities, that create and sell cyberweapons to customers who then select targets and operate the cyberweapons. These tools were observed targeting and surveiling dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists, civil society advocates, and other private citizens, threatening many global human rights efforts.

Influence operations: information campaigns communicated online or offline in a manipulative fashion to shift perceptions, behaviors, or decisions by target audiences to further a group or a nation's interests and objectives.

Groups in development: a temporary designation given to an unknown, emerging, or developing threat activity. This designation allows Microsoft to track a group as a discrete set of information until we can reach high confidence about the origin or identity of the actor behind the operation. Once criteria are met, a group in development is converted to a named actor or merged into existing names.

In this taxonomy, a weather event or family name represents one of the above categories. For nation-state actors, we assigned a family name to a country/region of origin tied to attribution. For example, Typhoon indicates origin or attribution to China. For other actors, the family name represents a motivation. For example, Tempest indicates financially motivated actors.

Threat actors within the same weather family are given an adjective to distinguish actor groups with distinct tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), infrastructure, objectives, or other identified patterns. For groups in development, we use a temporary designation of Storm and a four-digit number where there's a newly discovered, unknown, emerging, or developing cluster of threat activity.

The following table shows how the family names map to the threat actors that we track.

The following table lists publicly disclosed threat actor names with their origin or threat actor category, previous names, and corresponding names used by other security vendors where available. This page will be updated as more info on other vendors' names become available.

Read our announcement about this taxonomy for more information: https://aka.ms/threatactorsblog

Putting intelligence into the hands of security professionals

Intel profiles in Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence bring crucial insights about threat actors. These insights enable security teams to get the context they need as they prepare for and respond to threats.

Additionally, the Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence Intel Profiles API provides the most up-to-date threat actor infrastructure visibility in the industry today. Updated information is crucial in enabling threat intelligence and security operations (SecOps) teams to streamline their advanced threat hunting and analysis workflows. Learn more about this API in the documentation: Use the threat intelligence APIs in Microsoft Graph (preview).

Resources

Use the following query on Microsoft Defender XDR and other Microsoft security products supporting the Kusto query language (KQL) to get information about a threat actor using the old name, new name, or industry name:

let TANames = externaldata(PreviousName: string, NewName: string, Origin: string, OtherNames: dynamic)[@"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/mstic/master/PublicFeeds/ThreatActorNaming/MicrosoftMapping.json"] with(format="multijson", ingestionMapping='[{"Column":"PreviousName","Properties":{"Path":"$.Previous name"}},{"Column":"NewName","Properties":{"Path":"$.New name"}},{"Column":"Origin","Properties":{"Path":"$.Origin/Threat"}},{"Column":"OtherNames","Properties":{"Path":"$.Other names"}}]'); let GetThreatActorAlias = (Name: string) { TANames | where Name =~ NewName or Name =~ PreviousName or OtherNames has Name }; GetThreatActorAlias("ZINC") 

The following files containing the comprehensive mapping of old threat actor names with their new names are also available:

• JSON format
• downloadable Excel