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

Investigating a phishing attack

We will use Volatility 3 to examine the memory image we obtained with Live Response Collection. As we remember from Chapter 5, Understanding Ransomware Affiliates' Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, one of the most common techniques used by commodity malware is process injection. Let's start from low-hanging fruits, running the malfind plugin against the memory image.

Figure 8.7 – A part of the malfind output

This Volatility plugin helps to find hidden or injected code or DLLs, so it's very useful for the detection of process injection techniques.

There are a few artifacts extracted by malfind, but the most interesting one is related to the rundll32.exe process with the 9772 PID, which you can see in the preceding screenshot. Based on the output, most likely there's code injection. Very often, IT professionals and junior security analysts disregard rundll32.exe, but this legitimate executable should...