Cyber Threat Analysis -- Why Do I Read A Chinese Language Forum 4+ Hours A Day?

I could wow you with a PR-style speech about how we are now in a new era. I could use the words cyber, nation-state, attribution, and other big-boy buzzwords that are populating the mainstream media today.

But I'm not.

We've all seen the fallout from the cyber threat, some of us closer than others. A coworker of mine had to accompany his mother to the ER after a bad car accident. She was in pretty bad shape, but couldn't be seen for two hours. The front desk told him it was a bug in their system, and after he told the receptionist he was in IT and could help, she then admitted the hospital had been hit with ransomware.

We know the ramifications. They're not just silly pictures being posted on websites, embarrassing evidence of an affair leaked to your wife, or your internet running a little slow. Cyber threats are now affecting us all on a much larger scale. Petya followed very closely on the heels of WannaCry, hammering the globe with ransomware on a scale that most seasoned threat researchers didn't expect.

What is my place in this?

Every attack, no matter the scale, has an actor behind the keyboard. This actor has a mission and a reason for each and every stroke. Sometimes, it's simple: quick cash, disruption of competition, or for the Lulz. But it's rarely that simple. At the time of writing, the world is in the tumultuous game of cat-and-mouse, commonly known as attribution. We're trying to figure out who the threat actor was behind the keyboard.

**That is my place. **

This blog is where I will post open source intelligence on the various threat actors we are seeing now, have seen in the past, and might see in the future. It's impossible to write an entirely apolitical blog about threat actors with strong political motivation, but this blog is bipartisan in every sense of the word. I'm here to offer the world a glimpse inside the shady, dark areas of cyber threat actors, and to act as a curator, a Librarian of sorts to give my readers a peak inside the heads of these multifarious global threats.

Join me in my investigation! I'll be posting as much as possible, hopefully every day. Leave comments on where you'd like the investigation to go next, what changes should be made, and what you'd like to see more of!