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

The Unified Kill Chain

The Unified Kill Chain merges and extends the Cyber Kill Chain® and MITRE ATT&CK®. It was developed by Paul Pols in his master's thesis, Modeling Fancy Bear Attacks: Unifying the Cyber Kill Chain.

The white paper is available here: https://www.unifiedkillchain.com/assets/The-Unified-Kill-Chain.pdf.

The Unified Kill Chain splits the attack life cycle into three main stages: Initial Foothold, Network Propagation, and Action on Objectives. Let's look at each stage separately.

Initial Foothold

The first stage describes the steps performed by threat actors to gain access to the target system or network.

Figure 12.1 – The steps of the Initial Foothold stage

The life cycle starts with researching the target (Reconnaissance). Then, ransomware affiliates need to prepare the infrastructure: malware (including ransomware) and other weaponized objects, as well as C2 infrastructure, and so on (Weaponization...