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

Master file table

A filesystem contains a lot of different artifacts that can help us in our investigation process. Furthermore, Windows Registry and various logs are also part of the filesystem, but as they are quite complex, we're going to look at them separately.

The most common filesystem type you'll face during your ransomware attacks investigations is the New Technology File System (NTFS). Currently, this is the most common filesystem for Windows, which as you already know, is the main target of ransomware affiliates. Despite the fact that there is an increased interest in Linux systems, usually the threat actors get there through Windows infrastructure compromise, so we'll focus on this operating system.

As incident responders, we're very interested in metadata analysis, so let's dive into one of the core components of NTFS – the Master File Table (MFT). It contains information about filenames, locations, sizes, and, of course, their timestamps...