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

Human-operated ransomware attacks may be very complex, especially if we are talking about Big Game Hunting – attacks on huge enterprises. So, before diving into the technical details, it's very important to understand the life cycle of a typical attack. Understanding the attack life cycle helps security professionals to both perform proper reconstruction of an incident and make adequate decisions at various stages of the incident response life cycle.

As you already know from Chapter 1, The History of Human-Operated Ransomware Attacks, a ransomware strain can be operated by a group or multiple threat actors, if we are talking about ransomware-as-a-service programs. What does this mean? Tactics, techniques, and procedures may be quite different, but for most cases the attack life cycle will still be quite similar, as threat actors usually have two main goals – to exfiltrate sensitive information out...