Book Image

Cybersecurity - Attack and Defense Strategies

By : Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Book Image

Cybersecurity - Attack and Defense Strategies

By: Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Overview of this book

The book will start talking about the security posture before moving to Red Team tactics, where you will learn the basic syntax for the Windows and Linux tools that are commonly used to perform the necessary operations. You will also gain hands-on experience of using new Red Team techniques with powerful tools such as python and PowerShell, which will enable you to discover vulnerabilities in your system and how to exploit them. Moving on, you will learn how a system is usually compromised by adversaries, and how they hack user's identity, and the various tools used by the Red Team to find vulnerabilities in a system. In the next section, you will learn about the defense strategies followed by the Blue Team to enhance the overall security of a system. You will also learn about an in-depth strategy to ensure that there are security controls in each network layer, and how you can carry out the recovery process of a compromised system. Finally, you will learn how to create a vulnerability management strategy and the different techniques for manual log analysis.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Operating system logs


The types of logs available in an operating system may vary; in this book, we will focus on core logs that are relevant from a security perspective. We will use Windows and Linux operating systems to demonstrate that.

Windows logs

In a Windows operating system, the most relevant security-related logs are accessible via Event Viewer. In Chapter 13, Investigating an Incident, we spoke about the most common events that should be reviewed during an investigation. While the events can be easily located in Event Viewer, you can also obtain the individual files at Windows\System32\winevt\Logs, as shown in the following screenshot:

However, log analysis in an operating system is not necessarily limited to the logging information provided by the OS, especially in Windows. There are other sources of information that you could use, including prefetch files (Windows Prefetch). These files contain relevant information regarding process execution. They can be useful when trying to understand...