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)

Clearing the Field

Ending an operation is arguably just as important as starting an operation. Planning several end conditions early on with playbooks can help your team achieve their goals throughout the conflict. From the offensive perspective, after an operation, you will want to clean up the environment to ensure you are not caught or attributed to any breaches. In the event you've been detected, the offensive operations will need to save as much of the operations as they can, either pivoting deeper internally or by burning down their access and backing out of the target environment. If you are a defender, making sure that you've successfully scoped the intrusion is paramount. This is a daunting task, meaning the attacker has been properly identified with all assets they've compromised, the root cause of the compromise has been identified, and any evidence the defenders have collected has been exploited. After identifying and containing the attacker, the defense...