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

Strategic cyber threat intelligence

Strategic cyber threat intelligence is usually focused on decision-makers (Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), and so on), as it describes high-level trends and threat actors' motives, and generally allows us to understand the who and why. This empowers the CISO/CIO and any cyber executive to have a technical and tactical understanding, along with foresight on what new threat actor trends are up and coming.

So, the who refers to the threat actors targeting or potentially targeting the organization, and the why to their motivation.

In terms of motives, ransomware threat actors are quite predictable in that they are financially motivated. Their main goal is to get money, which is usually a significant amount, from the victim.

Another important thing is the threat actors' targets. For example, some ransomware operators don't target hospitals, the government...