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

LNK files

LNK files are automatically created by the Windows operating system once a user (or an attacker) opens a local or a remote file. These files can be found under the following locations:

  • C:\%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\
  • C:\%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Office\Recent\

Among other data, such files contain the timestamps both for the LNK itself and the file it points to. It is the file that was opened (and may be deleted already, by the way).

Again, there's a tool for parsing such files, LECmd:

Figure 7.11 – A part of LECmd output

As you can see in the screenshot, here we have evidence that the threat actors dumped LSASS – a very common technique for credentials access.

Let's look at another similar filesystem source of digital forensic artifacts – jump lists.