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

Bypassing defenses

In most cases, ransomware affiliates must use various techniques to avoid detection throughout the attack life cycle. They may disable/uninstall security software, obfuscate or encrypt data, or, for example, remove indicators from compromised hosts.

Exploiting for defense evasion (T1211)

The threat actors may exploit various vulnerabilities to bypass security products and features. And, of course, I have an example from the real world. Robinhood ransomware affiliates exploited a vulnerability in the Gigabyte driver (CVE-2018-19320). This allowed the threat actors to load another unsigned driver, which was used to kill processes and services related to security products and enable successful ransomware deployment.

Deobfuscating/decoding files or information (T1140)

It's quite common for both malware and ransomware to use various obfuscation techniques, such as encryption and encoding, to bypass detection mechanisms. A very common obfuscation technique...