Microsoft and CrowdStrike finally fix the stupidest problem in cybersecurity

In cybersecurity, every second counts. But when the same hacking group goes by half a dozen different names depending on which company you ask, defenders are left wasting time instead of stopping attacks. Now, Microsoft and CrowdStrike are teaming up to clean up the mess they helped create.

The two companies just announced a joint effort to map their threat actor naming systems to each other. Basically, it’s a cheat sheet for decoding the confusing and conflicting names used across the industry. Midnight Blizzard? That’s Microsoft’s name for what CrowdStrike calls Cozy Bear. Others call it APT29 or UNC2452.

This new collaboration isn’t about creating one universal naming system. It’s more like a decoder ring. The goal is to give security professionals a way to translate between naming conventions, so they can make faster, more confident decisions without spending half their time cross-referencing aliases.

The guide includes a mapped list of common threat actors tracked by both Microsoft and CrowdStrike, along with each company’s aliases. It’s a nod to guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which has long said that standardized threat sharing improves coordination and response.

This move could speed up everything from analysis to real-time decision-making. It also acknowledges what many in the cybersecurity world already know: the current system is a fragmented mess, and that chaos plays right into the hands of attackers.

Microsoft says this is just the beginning. Google’s Mandiant team and Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 are expected to join the project soon. If that happens, defenders might finally get some clarity in a landscape that’s been overloaded with code names and confusion for years.

Security may be a shared responsibility, but for too long, sharing has been hindered by branding wars. Now, the people who created the confusion say they’re ready to fix it. Better late than never, I suppose…