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Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

How Microsoft names threat actors → https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/def...

Microsoft shifts to a new threat actor naming taxonomy → https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/04/18/mic...

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It's amazing to me how there are really only 4 named countries (China, North Korea, Iran, Russia). I guess it's probably just more political and state sponsored than I would have guessed. Or it's not based on prevalence of attack sources and it's dictated more directly by some US policy? For example, you might also expect India because 1) it's a massive country with many people, 2) it's fairly independent and at least not a US ally, and 3) it's the home of plenty of malicious scam operations.

There aren't that many countries in the world with nation-scale hacker groups - the only ones I'd add is Israel with all their involvement into commercial spyware (and Mossad, whose capabilities likely surpass even the NSA), but they're heavily allied with the US.

> (and Mossad, whose capabilities likely surpass even the NSA)

What makes you say that ? Can you point to some interesting discussions / reporting ?

Everyone else outsources to NSO?

India’s an ally. It shares military bases with the USA and they’re also in each others favorite countries

That would be a very oversimplified conclusion. They are categorized as a major defense partner but are also rather close with Russia (getting 65% of their weapons from them [0]). They cooperate strategically but are rather independent. None of this is a slight to India - I'm just contrasting it to Europe which is decidedly in the US camp.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-pivots-away-russia...

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