Microsoft recently announced the new naming taxonomy of identifying threat actors by associating them with weather events. This is a change from their previous approach which named threat actors after chemical elements. As threats continue to evolve in complexity and increase in volume, Microsoft sees this as a way to for threat researchers to “instantly have an idea of the type of threat actor they are up against, just by reading the name.” In Microsoft’s new taxonomy, nation-state actors will be assigned certain weather conditions. For example, Russia is aligned with Blizzard, China with Typhoon, Iran with Sandstorm, and North Korea with Sleet. Microsoft has assigned four (4) additional weather event “families” to non-state actors based on motivation, using Tempest for financially motivated actors, Tsunami for private sector offensive actors, Flood for influence operations, and Storm for groups in development who don’t yet have enough information learned about them to be grouped into another category. For threat actors in the same weather families, an adjective will be added to differentiate them based on differing tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), infrastructure, objectives, and other distinguishing factors. Microsoft’s new naming taxonomy is aimed at simplifying the multitude of naming conventions already used amongst the security giants. Especially with the amounts of threat intelligence data that researchers are already confronted with, this new naming convention is seen as a simpler method of tracking and classifying threat groups in a way that’s efficient and easy to understand.