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 lateral movement techniques

Ransomware affiliates don't want to stay on the initially compromised host; they want to gather information about the network and start moving laterally as fast as possible, so they can find and collect sensitive data and go to the final stage – ransomware deployment.

Administrative shares

One of the common ways to start moving laterally is to abuse Windows administrative shares, such as C$, ADMIN$, and $IPC. If proper credentials were obtained, ransomware affiliates could easily browse files on remote hosts or even copy files to them.

We already looked into the NTUSER.dat file. Let's look inside it again, this time with Registry Explorer.

Figure 9.13 – Evidence of accessing the C:\ drive of 192.168.1.76

So, we can see that our compromised user accessed 192.168.1.76. Interesting! Let's get the $MFT file from that host and try to understand whether anything was copied to the host...