Book Image

Adversarial Tradecraft in Cybersecurity

By : Dan Borges
Book Image

Adversarial Tradecraft in Cybersecurity

By: Dan Borges

Overview of this book

Little has been written about what to do when live hackers are on your system and running amok. Even experienced hackers tend to choke up when they realize the network defender has caught them and is zoning in on their implants in real time. This book will provide tips and tricks all along the kill chain of an attack, showing where hackers can have the upper hand in a live conflict and how defenders can outsmart them in this adversarial game of computer cat and mouse. This book contains two subsections in each chapter, specifically focusing on the offensive and defensive teams. It begins by introducing you to adversarial operations and principles of computer conflict where you will explore the core principles of deception, humanity, economy, and more about human-on-human conflicts. Additionally, you will understand everything from planning to setting up infrastructure and tooling that both sides should have in place. Throughout this book, you will learn how to gain an advantage over opponents by disappearing from what they can detect. You will further understand how to blend in, uncover other actors’ motivations and means, and learn to tamper with them to hinder their ability to detect your presence. Finally, you will learn how to gain an advantage through advanced research and thoughtfully concluding an operation. By the end of this book, you will have achieved a solid understanding of cyberattacks from both an attacker’s and a defender’s perspective.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Offensive perspective

As we start this chapter, we will look at several tactics that help attackers blend into existing programs and protocols. By looking like normal applications or normal traffic, an attacker can run uninterrupted for longer. This chapter aims to harness our principle of deception as a way to protect our running code and our command and control (C2) callbacks. We are also leaning on the principle of humanity, that at first glance these things may appear normal or even important. Granted, there is only so much preparation, obfuscation, and deception attackers can apply; if the defender digs into many of these techniques deeply, there will be tells that reveal the attacker techniques are illegitimate and even malicious. As we will see, it's important for the attacker to also know how closely they mimic reality and where their deception departs, so that they can pivot in their tactics if the defender gets too close. Further, the attacker can think of their persistence...