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)

Defensive perspective

In the last section, we saw a number of techniques for blending both network traffic and on-host persistence items into the target environment. In this section, we examine some of these techniques more closely, looking at how the covert channels differ from the normal protocols.

We will also look at how to audit and detect various persistence items and rogue executables. The crux of this section is knowing what normal looks like and how to spot an attacker as abnormal in your normal environment. We will end this section by baiting an attacker into revealing themselves with several techniques and traps.

C2 detection

Let's start by looking at ways to detect anomalous traffic. If you can detect malicious traffic on your network, then this is often a strong indicator of which hosts are infected on your network. We can drill down on the infected hosts by first detecting them calling out of the network, then finding which process on a particular host...