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

Chapter 11: Investigating Ransomware Deployment Techniques

The main goal of a human-operated ransomware attack is to encrypt as much data as possible. In many cases, the threat actors use various ransomware families obtained via ransomware-as-a-service programs or developed by some of the team members. At the same time, in some cases, they may use legitimate software for encryption. Common examples are BitLocker and DiskCryptor.

Usually, at this point, ransomware affiliates have full control over the compromised network: they collected information about the available hosts, obtained elevated credentials, removed backups, disabled security products, and placed backdoors for redundant access.

In this chapter, we'll look at the most common techniques leveraged by threat actors to deploy ransomware in enterprise networks, and also briefly discuss the process of ransomware analysis.

We'll cover the following topics:

  • Investigation of abusing RDP for ransomware...