What Are Different Types Of Threat Actors

Threat Actor also known as malicious actor or bad actor which act as a cyber criminal in every cyber attack.

Threat actor is an individual person, group of people, or organization work together to fulfill their personal, financial and social desires.

Types of threat actors classified based on their desires:

Hackers & cyber criminals:

 Individual or group of people works together to exploit the vulnerabilities in computer systems from various, IT or Finance sector for financial gain. They are able to hack your bank accounts, credit & debit cards as we see in movies.

Scammers:

Individual or group of people works to dupe people by using some tricks and techniques to get access to their bank accounts, credit and debit cards.

Mostly over call by asking OTP’s by fake KYC’s requests or by phishing emails where they will ask you to login to your bank account to avail some offers. 

Sometime they trick you to do payment for some online products through social media classy & attractive advertisements and then never deliver that product and also you will not able to contact them.

Fake job offers also falls under scams, where consultancies ask for fair ammount of money before releasing offer letter.

Currently  trending scam is share market, trading, investments where scammers will guide you to invest through non-legitimate broker app and then you will not able to withdraw until you pay 10% of your investment to app.

Big Game Hunters:

              Individual or group of people work together for long time and target big organizations or high profile individuals. These attackers focus on gaining access to victims personal data by using different data breach techniques and then they demands high amount of money in exchange of promises of not to leak that personal data.

              Sometimes they use DDoS attack to prevent organizations and individual to access specific personal data. And then demands ransom amount of money in exchange of restoring access to data.

Nation-State Actors:

              Individual or group of skilled people hired by state government usually aim for high-profile targets such as military secrets, infrastructures, massive-scale disinformation, or propaganda campaigns.  Most states ask them to attack on other state/country to get government intelligence details etc.

              They also work to keep their home country safe from cyber attacks from other nation state actors. They have high level of intelligence, resources, financial support from government. So they won’t get arrested in their home country for what they are doing.

Competitors:

              Individual or group of people also known as competitors always try to steal deals information or operating secrets of businesses which they are also involved in.

              They are called as business competitors aim to be first in business and always have fear of losing their market value by which they use route of different cyber attacks to harm competitor organization by gaining access to it’s useful servers to exploit, exfiltrate use misuse its data.

Hacktivist and Terrorist:

              Both works similarly but their end goals are different. Hacktivist is combination of hacking and activism, they work to to spread their message socially and politically using attacks by hacking different apps, websites, TV Channels, mobile networks, telephone network etc.

              Their actions can range from website defacement and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to data breaches and information leaks, all aimed at raising awareness, protesting, or advocating for specific social cause.

              Terrorist also use same way of attacks  but their end goal is to spread news and terror, also they have motive to harm human beings.

Thrill Seekers:

              A thrill seeker is a type of threat actor that attacks a system for the sole purpose of experimentation and study.

 Thrill seekers are interested in learning more about how computer systems and networks operate and want to see how much data they can infiltrate within a computer system.

While they do not aim to cause major damage, they can cause problems to an organization’s system. Mostly students are involved in this type of threat actor’s category.

Insiders:

Insider’s threat actors are mostly organization current or past employee, who sells organization secrets, personal and operational data to other attackers. Most cases employee who feel they need to retaliate because they feel they have been treated unfairly, or they didn’t get enough appreciation or remuneration of the hard work they put in projects.

Script Kiddies:

Script Kiddies are actors who don’t have much knowledge about cyber attacks but they tried to use existing internet available scripts to perform small actions such as guessing passwords, website defacement, DDoS attacks.  By practicing they can become skilled hackers but their aim is mostly to get famous or take revenge at the level of their friend circle. But they can get converted to above all actors based on their internal intuitions and building desires over time.