A hacker is an individual or a hacker group. When a state is involved we can think more about the typical work of intelligence agencies and/or cyberwar.
Threat actor is a more generic term that covers all kinds of attackers.
For example, it could be an insider who exploits existing privileges (no hacking involved). Or it could refer to a nation state or organised crime (not an individual).
One of the things that troubled me most in the vault 7 was the
"attribution engineering toolkit".
Some sophisticated stuff goes into not just crafting function, but
what something looks like
I am always sceptical... no, quite cynical, when a few days or hours
after an incident someone pops up and says "It was the
<Russians/Koreans/Chinese>"
Perhaps one of the most potent payloads in some hacks, perhaps even
the overarching motive, is to pin the action on someone or something.
It raises the question, how much that really matters.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 45.1 ms ] thread'Cloudflare Hacked by Suspected State-Sponsored Threat Actor' ___Security Week
'Thanksgiving 2023 security incident' ___Cloudflare
Original blog is here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/thanksgiving-2023-security-incid...
https://youtu.be/UawS3_iuHoA?t=378
For example, it could be an insider who exploits existing privileges (no hacking involved). Or it could refer to a nation state or organised crime (not an individual).
Some sophisticated stuff goes into not just crafting function, but what something looks like
I am always sceptical... no, quite cynical, when a few days or hours after an incident someone pops up and says "It was the <Russians/Koreans/Chinese>"
Perhaps one of the most potent payloads in some hacks, perhaps even the overarching motive, is to pin the action on someone or something.
It raises the question, how much that really matters.