The great thing about standards is there’s so many to pick from, right?. (Insert obligatory XKCD #927 here.) Several companies have developed naming schemes to refer to groups of attacks, and now Google has too.
Sometimes, malware, ransomware, or exploit groups name themselves: “Shinyhunters”, “LapSus$”, “Cl0p”, “Lockbit”, and so on. For the groups that don’t advertise their presence, identification and naming can be more difficult. Mostly state-run affairs that didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, these Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) groups were originally simply given numbers. APT28 refers to the Russian GRU Intelligence Directorate suspected of hacking the Democratic Party email servers, APT38 is a North Korean governmental agency involved in financial and crypto currency theft.
Multiple companies and agencies have developed naming schemes to make referring to threat groups easier, typically including a regional identifier as well. CrowdStrike naming uses name groups like “Bear” group for suspected Russian actors, “Panda” for China, “Spider” for unattributed crime groups, while Microsoft uses “Blizzard”, “Typhoon”, and “Tempest”.
Google, deciding there weren’t enough classifications already, now introduces “RELIC”, “CASTLE”, and “COMET”. Of course, each naming organization has dozens of other classification groups as well, but now the next time you hear about an attack being attributed to “Scattered Spider” you know it’s the CrowdStrike name for a crime group.
