Book Image

Incident Response Techniques for Ransomware Attacks

Book Image

Incident Response Techniques for Ransomware Attacks

Overview of this book

Ransomware attacks have become the strongest and most persistent threat for many companies around the globe. Building an effective incident response plan to prevent a ransomware attack is crucial and may help you avoid heavy losses. Incident Response Techniques for Ransomware Attacks is designed to help you do just that. This book starts by discussing the history of ransomware, showing you how the threat landscape has changed over the years, while also covering the process of incident response in detail. You’ll then learn how to collect and produce ransomware-related cyber threat intelligence and look at threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures. Next, the book focuses on various forensic artifacts in order to reconstruct each stage of a human-operated ransomware attack life cycle. In the concluding chapters, you’ll get to grips with various kill chains and discover a new one: the Unified Ransomware Kill Chain. By the end of this ransomware book, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to build an incident response strategy for all ransomware attacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with a Modern Ransomware Attack
5
Section 2: Know Your Adversary: How Ransomware Gangs Operate
9
Section 3: Practical Incident Response

Non-volatile data collection

Before we dive into the various sources of non-volatile data sources, let's learn how to collect data sources. Of course, you must have heard about forensic images – bit stream copies of digital media. Yes, in some cases, we still create such copies; for example, for the initially compromised host, which may contain lots of various artifacts related to the threat actors' activities. Such images may be created with AccessData FTK Imager:

Figure 7.4 – Creating a bit stream image with AccessData FTK Imager

But, in many cases, you have quite a lot of compromised hosts, so creating images of every system may be quite a daunting task. Instead, you may want to create a triage image – it will contain a number of files as well as some additional data, such as information on network connections.

A pretty good tool for collecting triage data is Live Response Collection (https://www.brimorlabs.com/Tools/LiveResponseCollection...