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

Ransomware deployment

In your opinion, what's a ransomware operator's worst enemy? Yes, you're right, backups – secure and not tampered with backups. But they have a very bad weakness – they can be deleted by threat actors.

Unfortunately, system administrators often don't think about either the 3-2-1 rule (3 backup copies on 2 different media with 1 located offsite) or separate accounts and multi-factor authentication for the backup servers. What's more, nowadays, having proper secure backups isn't only important for ransomware mitigation, but also to ensure an organization meets industry regulatory requirements.

What does this mean? If the attackers obtain domain administrator credentials, they can easily access the backup servers and wipe all available backups. That's it, so the victim company has no other choice than to pay the ransom.

Also, talking about backups, some ransomware samples have built-in capabilities for wiping...