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 web browser abuse for data exfiltration

As you already know from the previous chapters, ransomware affiliates abuse Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections both for initial access and lateral movement quite often, so they can easily use built-in legitimate tools to solve various tasks, including data exfiltration.

One such tool is a web browser. Threat actors may use it to upload sensitive data collected by them to various file-sharing services, for example, DropMeFiles.

Web browsers have great logging capabilities, so digital forensic analysts and incident responders can always check the browsing history for any traces of data exfiltration.

Let's look at a classic version of a built-in web browser – Microsoft Edge. History data is stored in a WebCacheV01.dat file that is an Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) database. Of course, there are quite a few tools that can be used to browse and analyze its contents. A good example is ESEDatabaseView from...