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

Chapter 8: Investigating Initial Access Techniques

In the previous chapter, we looked at various sources of digital forensic artifacts available on Windows systems. Now, it's time to start looking at some case studies so that we can understand how exactly those artifacts can be used for ransomware attack life cycle reconstruction.

We'll start by finding evidence for the most common initial access techniques – abusing external remote services and phishing.

Abusing external remote services, especially publicly exposed RDP servers, is an extremely common technique. However, more than 50% of successful attacks start from a successful brute-force attack against such servers.

Almost the same can be said about phishing – lots of different bots, which are distributed via email and other media, are now precursors to ransomware attacks.

In this chapter, we'll investigate two cases based on real attack scenarios. The following topics will be covered:

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