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

LockBit ransomware overview

Before starting the encryption process, LockBit ransomware kills processes and stops services from a built-in list, and inhibits system recovery by running the following commands:

vssadmin delete shadows /all /quiet & wmic shadowcopy delete & bcdedit /set {default} bootstatuspolicy ignoreallfailures & bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled no & wbadmin delete catalog -quiet

LockBit uses the AES-128 cipher in CBC mode to encrypt files on the target host. It appends the .lockbit extension to each encrypted file, and changes their icons.

It also changes the wallpaper to the following:

Figure 11.20 – LockBit 2.0 wallpaper

LockBit creates ransom notes in every folder with encrypted files. The ransom notes have the following name: RESTORE-MY-FILES.txt.

LockBit ransomware may also create a Group Policy object in order to disable antivirus software, kill a list of processes, and distribute itself.

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