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 reconnaissance techniques

As you'll remember, one of the main goals of threat actors is to encrypt as many hosts as possible, so they need to collect information about the network they got into. They may just scan it to obtain information about remote hosts, or use various Active Directory reconnaissance tools, such as AdFind or ADRecon.

Network scanning

Through the analysis of SRUM artifacts, we already collected information about an executable named netscan.exe. Based on this information, we may already suspect that this file was used by ransomware affiliates for network scanning.

First, we need to understand where it is located. We already have $MFT parsed, so let's start from it. MFT analysis allows you to understand better which artifacts may be useful for further investigation and look at the attack from a filesystem perspective.

Figure 9.9 – Path to netscan.exe obtained from $MFT

Now we can see that netscan.exe...