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 credential access techniques

To be able to start moving laterally, first of all, ransomware affiliates need to obtain elevated credentials. There are a number of popular techniques used by threat actors to solve this problem. For example, they can dump the process memory of the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) to extract credential material or perform a kerberoasting attack. Let's look at how digital forensic analysis can help us to uncover these techniques.

Credential dumping with hacking tools

As you already know, the most common tool for credential dumping is the notorious Mimikatz, developed and maintained by Benjamin Delpy. As it's extremely popular, even built-in antivirus software is usually able to detect and remove it. But, as you know, threat actors commonly deactivate it, so there are cases where ransomware affiliates even download it to the compromised host from the official GitHub page.

Figure 9.1 &...