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

Discovering credential access and theft

One key vulnerability that ransomware threat actors will often leverage is the way that the Windows OS manages credentials within memory. Credentials and their associated password hashes are managed by the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS). This process, which runs in memory, contains the credentials of user accounts that have logged into or are currently logged into the system. In addition, Kerberos authentication tickets can be on the system within this process’ address space. Because of its role in managing credentials, LSASS is a high-value target for ransomware threat actors.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework contains a full list of Credential Access [TA0006] techniques. In this case, we will look at two common techniques of OS credential dumping where the adversary accesses the LSASS process in running memory [T1003.001], along with the associated tools that are very common in ransomware attacks. In both cases, the...