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

Collecting and exfiltrating data

We've already discussed that modern human-operated ransomware attacks, in most cases, are not only about data encryption but about data exfiltration. There are multiple sources that ransomware affiliates may collect data from before exfiltration. Let's look at the most common ones.

Data from local system (T1005)

The threat actors may find valuable data on some of the compromised systems. Agreements, contracts, or files containing personal data – all these may be used by ransomware affiliates for extortion.

Data from network shared drives (T1039)

Network shared drives are very common sources of potentially sensitive information, so data in such locations is often collected and exfiltrated by various ransomware affiliates.

Email collection (T1114)

Some threat actors use a more targeted approach. For example, Cl0p ransomware affiliates usually tried to locate hosts that belonged to the target company's top management...