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 attacker's point of view, I will cover several ways to exfiltrate data out of the victim network. Specifically, I will start with some tips for harnessing anonymity networks to help protect the attacker's identity and operations. I will also cover custom internal anonymity networks we've designed for competition environments, such as CCDC. Later, I will cover clearing up your tools and eliminating your presence on the attacker network. I will also provide sample code that can stop an agent from executing with time-based triggers, such that even components that are forgotten about won't run after the operation's conclusion.

Exfiltration

Getting data out of a target environment is as important as getting into the environment itself. When planning an offensive operation, it's important to plan how to get your target information out. Sometimes it is very easy, and you can download the data directly through the C2 channel...