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

Collecting data sources for a phishing attack investigation

We already know that various bots, such as Emotet, Trickbot, and IcedID, are very common precursors of human-operated ransomware attacks. Usually, such bots are delivered via weaponized office documents through email. In most cases, the victim must enable the macros, so the malicious payload will end up being downloaded and executed. At the same time, the threat actors may exploit vulnerabilities to achieve the same results.

Bots are commonly used to perform basic reconnaissance and provide capabilities for further exploitation – for example, delivering additional tools such as Cobalt Strike's Beacon.

We have already played a bit with KAPE, so this time we'll use another tool – Live Response Collection.

This tool is even easier to use; all we need to do is run it from an external or network drive and choose operation mode.

Figure 8.6 – Running Live Response Collection...