Book Image

Digital Forensics and Incident Response - Third Edition

By : Gerard Johansen
5 (1)
Book Image

Digital Forensics and Incident Response - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: Gerard Johansen

Overview of this book

An understanding of how digital forensics integrates with the overall response to cybersecurity incidents is key to securing your organization’s infrastructure from attacks. This updated third edition will help you perform cutting-edge digital forensic activities and incident response with a new focus on responding to ransomware attacks. After covering the fundamentals of incident response that are critical to any information security team, you’ll explore incident response frameworks. From understanding their importance to creating a swift and effective response to security incidents, the book will guide you using examples. Later, you’ll cover digital forensic techniques, from acquiring evidence and examining volatile memory through to hard drive examination and network-based evidence. You’ll be able to apply these techniques to the current threat of ransomware. As you progress, you’ll discover the role that threat intelligence plays in the incident response process. You’ll also learn how to prepare an incident response report that documents the findings of your analysis. Finally, in addition to various incident response activities, the book will address malware analysis and demonstrate how you can proactively use your digital forensic skills in threat hunting. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to investigate and report unwanted security breaches and incidents in your organization.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Part 1: Foundations of Incident Response and Digital Forensics
6
Part 2: Evidence Acquisition
11
Part 3: Evidence Analysis
17
Part 4: Ransomware Incident Response
20
Part 5: Threat Intelligence and Hunting
Appendix

Ransomware initial access and execution

The first stage of ransomware attacks is initially accessing the target environment and executing the first stage of malware. This provides the initial foothold that threat actors need to carry out the remainder of the attack. Having an awareness of how this initial foothold is achieved allows analysts to extract the IOCs related to this stage of the attack with the intent of determining the scope and potential source of the attack.

Initial access

The primary method that ransomware threat actors utilize to get the initial foothold into the target environment is using a Spear Phishing Attachment attack [T1566.001]. In many cases, this involves the use of a Microsoft Word or Excel spreadsheet that has a macro that can execute a Virtual Basic Application (VBA). This macro is often the first stage in a multi-stage attack where the unsuspecting user executes the macro, which then reaches out to the adversary’s infrastructure to pull down...