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 cloud service client application abuse for data exfiltration

Ransomware affiliates may use built-in tools, such as web browsers, for data exfiltration, but also can install and execute third-party tools to solve this task.

So, it's always a good idea to check for freshly installed programs, which may be related to activities performed by the threat actors. Such information can be collected from the SOFTWARE registry file, which is located under C:\Windows\System32\config.

Information about installed programs can be located under SOFTWARE | Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall:

Figure 10.7 – Information on installed programs

We can get even more information on the installed application by checking the values of the MEGAsync subkey:

Figure 10.8 – MEGAsync installation details

MEGA provides the threat actors with great exfiltration capabilities, which is why many ransomware affiliates prefer...