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

Post-incident activity

At the final stage, the incident response team should help the affected organization to understand why the threat actors managed to successfully breach it and achieve their goals, and what to do to avoid similar situations in the future.

Of course, the incident life cycle may be quite different; it depends on the ransomware affiliates. So, based on what you have observed, you may form a list of recommendations. Let's look at the most common examples.

As you already know, many ransomware attacks start from exposed RDP-servers, so if that's the case, a good recommendation would be to choose other methods of remote access, or, for example, implement multi-factor authentication for such RDP connections.

Talking about public-facing parts of affected infrastructure, the organization should make sure all vulnerabilities, especially those allowing the threat actors to obtain valid credentials or run code remotely, are patched.

If spear phishing...