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

Windows Registry

Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores various configuration settings, and, of course, a lot of valuable information about program execution and user activities.

Let's start with Registry-related file locations. The first three files I want to mention are SAM, SYSTEM, and SOFTWARE. These files are located under C:\Windows\System32\config.

The next two files are NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT. There's a copy of both files in every user profile, so the first file is located under C:\Users\%USERNAME%, and the second under C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows.

One more important file, Amcache.hve, is located under C:\Windows\AppCompat\Programs.

The last registry file I want to mention is Syscache.hve, which is located under the C:\System Volume Information folder. It's not very common and is available only in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 installations, but it can still be very useful, as it contains SHA1...