You say Cozy Bear, I say Midnight Blizzard, Voodoo Bear, APT29 … Microsoft and CrowdStrike made a lot of noise on Monday about teaming up with other threat-intel outfits to "bring clarity to threat-actor naming." It's a great idea that would benefit network defenders tasked with keeping track of the 200-plus nation-state, financially motivated, and hacktivist crews that all the major …
Will they be given names like Storms; Norman, Hilda? That would be confusing when the BBC announces we're going to be hit by Hilda, half the country will be battening down the hatches and the other half turning their PCs off. How about names from Sci-Fi films; The Thanos Crew or The Doctor Doomers? Better yet, Mister Sinister? More British options; The Cybermen or Daleks, maybe The Quatermasses.
Over here in Blighty our leader made a speech about how he wanted to buy lots of death and destruction toys. I feel that he missed a trick when he didn’t propose to set up some serious government based defence of the situation we are in. I know governments have a, sometimes deserved, reputation for being less than efficient but this piece illustrates that the private sector is often little better and what we need here is a serious recognition of the situation we are in and some concerted effort to counteract it.
One thing that comes to my mind is to have a darpa like investigation into some protocols that have security built in to them rather than using ssl as an add on.
Also, a caveat, I am sure that the TLAs here have their own groups (would the UK one be called haveacuppa?) trying to wreak havoc on people they don’t like.
Librarians have been using authority lists for eons to keep track of authors and their aliases, taking multiple writing systems, languages, and commonly used misspellings into account. For authors and aliases, substitute stars and nebulae and you'll be looking at astronomers' catalogs.
An industry that lives off CVE numbers and credit card numbers and email addresses and so on has no excuse for failing to make identifications coherent, consistent, authoritative, and accessible.
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