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

Containment, eradication, and recovery

Once you have a good understanding of the attack you are dealing with, it's time to apply some containment measures.

The most common thing you can do is to block connections to the command and control servers. Without this, the threat actors can hardly do any harm to the network – of course, if they didn't deploy some scheduled tasks, for example, which'll run another backdoor with another command and control server.

So, it may be a good idea to isolate the whole network from the internet. But, of course, it depends on the stage of the attack life cycle. If you managed to detect it at an early stage, isolating the whole network may not really be a good idea, but if the threat actors spent a month inside, well, why not!

Another thing many ransomware affiliates commonly use is legitimate remote access applications. Here are some examples commonly seen during ransomware incident response engagements:

  • TeamViewer...