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)

Preface

This book provides some theories and tools to prepare readers for the fast-paced and subversive world of cyber conflict. This book is designed to give competitors in various infosec attack and defense competitions a serious advantage, through providing theory, scripts, and techniques that will put the opponent on the backfoot. These same strategies can easily be applied to a real-world cyber incident, giving incident responders new tricks to deceive and best attackers. This book draws from years of competition experience, many well-accepted industry concepts, and existing open source tools rather than reinventing the wheel each chapter. The goal of Adversarial Tradecraft in Cybersecurity is to dive deep into both deceptive attacker techniques and detections. This text starts with a chapter on theory to help prepare readers for the following chapters, followed by a chapter focused on setting up supporting infrastructure. After that, the book works through various escalating techniques that may be leveraged by either side in a cyber conflict. Chapters 3 through 8 cover tactics, techniques, and tools that both sides can leverage to get the advantage in a conflict. Chapter 8 specifically goes into how to resolve a conflict and remediate an intrusion such that the attacker doesn't maintain access. A synopsis of each chapter can be found below, covering some of the high-level topics included in the book.