Incident attribution is the process of linking a security event to a specific actor, group, or campaign. It uses evidence such as malware code, command-and-control infrastructure, tactics, victim selection, timestamps, and public claims. Good attribution is usually probabilistic, not absolute: defenders compare multiple signals to decide whether an event fits a known threat actor or is just similar by coincidence.
This matters because attribution drives response. If analysts can connect an incident to a recurring campaign, they can prioritize containment, search for related activity, and anticipate follow-on attacks. In practice, attribution also helps separate real compromise from noise: a ransom post, for example, is only a lead until logs, endpoint artifacts, and network traces confirm what happened. Poor attribution can waste resources, mislead executives, or wrongly blame the wrong actor, so defenders treat it as evidence-based analysis rather than a headline claim.