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've investigated two very common techniques used by ransomware affiliates to obtain initial access – abusing external remote services and phishing.

As you can see, various artifacts can be used to reconstruct malicious activities, from volatile memory to Windows event log files. Also, we can use various means of data collection and limit collected data based on a case. This is very important, especially if we need to collect and analyze data from multiple hosts simultaneously.

Of course, initial access is only the beginning of a human-operated ransomware attack, so there are a lot of things incident responders need to be able to uncover.

In the next chapter, we'll focus on various post-exploitation activities, such as reconnaissance and credential access.