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 third-party cloud synchronization tool abuse for data exfiltration

Threat actors use a wide variety of tools, including absolutely legitimate ones, to solve various tasks at different stages of the attack life cycle. Of course, the data exfiltration stage isn't an exception. We have already looked at web browsers and cloud service client application abuse for solving this task, but let's look at one more example.

Ransomware affiliates may want to be even stealthier to avoid detection and may leverage various masquerading techniques.

For example, they can rename tools to look like legitimate processes. As you already know, Shimcache is one of the most common sources of evidence of execution, so we can extract this data from the SYSTEM registry file (located under C:\Windows\System32\config), for example, via RegRipper, and check for any traces of leveraging masquerading.

Very soon, we notice the following record:

C:\Windows\svchost.exe 2021-12-26...