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

Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at the most common sources of digital forensic artifacts that can help incident responders in the investigation of human-operated ransomware attacks.

We not only looked through some common relevant filesystems, registries, and log locations and sources, but also learned how to collect both volatile and non-volatile information, as well as how to parse collected data so it's converted to a human-readable format ready for in-depth forensic analysis.

Now you are ready to dive into more practical tasks – real attack reconstruction of human-operated ransomware attacks based on various digital forensic artifacts.

In the next chapter, we'll look at a few initial access scenarios, use our acquired knowledge to understand how ransomware affiliates maintained the initial foothold, and start performing post-exploitation activities.