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.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

Download the color images

Section 1: Getting Started with a Modern Ransomware Attack

Free Chapter

Chapter 1: The History of Human-Operated Ransomware Attacks

2016 – SamSam ransomware

2017 – BitPaymer ransomware

2018 – Ryuk ransomware

2019-present – ransomware-as-a-service

Summary

Chapter 2: The Life Cycle of a Human-Operated Ransomware Attack

Initial attack vectors

Post-exploitation

Data exfiltration

Ransomware deployment

Summary

Chapter 3: The Incident Response Process

Preparation for an incident

Threat detection and analysis

Containment, eradication, and recovery

Post-incident activity

Summary

Section 2: Know Your Adversary: How Ransomware Gangs Operate

Chapter 4: Cyber Threat Intelligence and Ransomware

Strategic cyber threat intelligence

Operational cyber threat intelligence

Tactical cyber threat intelligence

Summary

Chapter 5: Understanding Ransomware Affiliates' Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures

Gaining initial access

Executing malicious code

Obtaining persistent access

Escalating privileges

Bypassing defenses

Accessing credentials

Moving laterally

Collecting and exfiltrating data

Ransomware deployment

Summary

Chapter 6: Collecting Ransomware-Related Cyber Threat Intelligence

Threat research reports

Community

Threat actors

Summary

Section 3: Practical Incident Response

Chapter 7: Digital Forensic Artifacts and Their Main Sources

Volatile memory collection and analysis

Non-volatile data collection

SRUM

Summary

Chapter 8: Investigating Initial Access Techniques

Collecting data sources for an external remote service abuse investigation

Investigating an RDP brute-force attack

Collecting data sources for a phishing attack investigation

Investigating a phishing attack

Summary

Chapter 9: Investigating Post-Exploitation Techniques

Investigating credential access techniques

Investigating reconnaissance techniques

Investigating lateral movement techniques

Summary

Chapter 10: Investigating Data Exfiltration Techniques

Investigating web browser abuse for data exfiltration

Investigating cloud service client application abuse for data exfiltration

Investigating third-party cloud synchronization tool abuse for data exfiltration

Investigating the use of custom data exfiltration tools

Summary

Chapter 11: Investigating Ransomware Deployment Techniques

Investigation of abusing RDP for ransomware deployment

Crylock ransomware overview

Investigation of Administrative shares for ransomware deployment

REvil ransomware overview

Investigation of Group Policy for ransomware deployment

LockBit ransomware overview

Summary

Chapter 12: The Unified Ransomware Kill Chain

Cyber Kill Chain®

MITRE ATT&CK®

The Unified Kill Chain

The Unified Ransomware Kill Chain

Summary

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Investigation of Group Policy for ransomware deployment

Another technique that's becoming more and more common among ransomware affiliates is Group Policy modification for ransomware deployment.

In most cases, the network is fully compromised, so it's not a big deal for the threat actors to move laterally to a domain controller and abuse Group Policy to execute ransomware enterprise-wide.

What's more, some ransomware samples have built-in capabilities to use Group Policy modification for self-distribution. A good example is LockBit ransomware.

You can use a similar technique we covered previously: find the first ransom note and start checking what happened before it was created. In this case, we can see that a very suspicious Group Policy Object (GPO) was created:

Figure 11.15 – Group Policy Object created by LockBit ransomware

As we can see, there's a new object created with the Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) {E97EFF8F...

Incident Response Techniques for Ransomware Attacks

Incident Response Techniques for Ransomware Attacks

Overview of this book

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Incident Response Techniques for Ransomware Attacks

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Investigation of Group Policy for ransomware deployment