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

Gaining initial access

Gaining initial access to the target network is a vital part of any intrusion, and ransomware attacks are not an exception.

Since various threat actors are involved in human-operated ransomware attacks, we, as incident responders, can face almost any tactic during our engagements.

Still, one of the most common tactics that's used by ransomware affiliates is abusing external remote services, such as Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), so it's going to be our starting point.

External remote services (T1133)

Using external remote services to obtain initial access is extremely common. For example, according to Group-IB's Ransomware Uncovered 2020/21 report, more than 50% of all human-operated ransomware attacks started from compromising a public-facing RDP server. The COVID-19 pandemic made it even worse; many companies required workplaces for remote personnel, which gave rise to even more poorly secured servers emerging on the world map.

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