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

Data exfiltration

Data exfiltration is sometimes referred to as data extrusion, data exportation, or data theft, and it's extremely popular among ransomware affiliates. Almost any threat actor involved in human-operated ransomware attacks has its own Dedicated Leak Site (DLS). They use such websites to publish information about successful attacks and even exfiltrated data if a company refuses to pay the ransom.

The amount of exfiltrated data may be very different. In some cases, it's just a few gigabytes, while in others it may be terabytes. Exfiltrated data may include credit card information, Social Security numbers (SSNs), Personal Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), and National Provider Identifiers (NPIs), but are not limited to company private information and proprietary information.

Here's an example of a DLS that belongs to the Conti ransomware:

Figure 2.7 – Conti ransomware DLS

Most such...