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

From the offensive side, we will look at various keylogging methods, essentially ways to get more intel from the defender or other users of the same machine. One of the major themes of this chapter will be keylogging or getting secret key material to access new hosts. By leveraging the principle of humanity, attackers can exploit the users of systems to get their keys or passwords, move to new hosts, and preferably administrative applications.

Another goal as an attacker, once uncovered by the defense, is to let the defense think they've won but maintain your access through stolen credentials or rootkits that we've explored in previous chapters. In the last chapter, we saw ways to blind the defender's tools. Later, in the Defensive perspective section of this chapter, we will see several techniques for blocking a user from accessing a machine completely, which are viable techniques the offense can use for blocking defenders as well. In...