Microsoft and CrowdStrike Launch Shared Threat Actor Glossary to Cut Attribution Confusion
Jun 03, 2025
Threat Intelligence / Cyber Threats
Microsoft and CrowdStrike have announced that they are teaming up to align their individual threat actor taxonomies by publishing a new joint threat actor mapping. "By mapping where our knowledge of these actors align, we will provide security professionals with the ability to connect insights faster and make decisions with greater confidence," Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president at Microsoft Security, said . The initiative is seen as a way to untangle the menagerie of nicknames that private cybersecurity vendors assign to various hacking groups that are broadly categorized as a nation-state, financially motivated, influence operations, private sector offensive actors, and emerging clusters. For example, the Russian state-sponsored threat actor tracked by Microsoft as Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium) is also known as APT29, BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, and The Dukes. Likewise, Forest Blizzard (previously Strontium) goes by other monikers such...