Book Image

Cybersecurity – Attack and Defense Strategies - Second Edition

By : Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Book Image

Cybersecurity – Attack and Defense Strategies - Second Edition

By: Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Overview of this book

Cybersecurity – Attack and Defense Strategies, Second Edition is a completely revised new edition of the bestselling book, covering the very latest security threats and defense mechanisms including a detailed overview of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and an assessment of the current threat landscape, with additional focus on new IoT threats and cryptomining. Cybersecurity starts with the basics that organizations need to know to maintain a secure posture against outside threat and design a robust cybersecurity program. It takes you into the mindset of a Threat Actor to help you better understand the motivation and the steps of performing an actual attack – the Cybersecurity kill chain. You will gain hands-on experience in implementing cybersecurity using new techniques in reconnaissance and chasing a user’s identity that will enable you to discover how a system is compromised, and identify and then exploit the vulnerabilities in your own system. This book also focuses on defense strategies to enhance the security of a system. You will also discover in-depth tools, including Azure Sentinel, to ensure there are security controls in each network layer, and how to carry out the recovery process of a compromised system.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

Windows Boot Sequence

In this section we will cover how Windows loads into our PCs from pressing the Power Button until we see the Windows desktop. If you understand how Windows loads and starts up, you can much more easily find out how attackers are designing their malware to be hidden during the boot up process. We will not cover the Boot Sequence in depth; all we want to do is explain the basics and provide you with the right resources if you wish to explore more, in order to build your Cyber Defense Strategy more effectively from an endpoint perspective.

Figure 30: Windows booting

  • SRAM: Static Random Access Memory
  • PBR: Partition Boot record
  • MBR: Master Boot Record
  • BIOS: Firmware used to hardware initialization
  • UEFI: Unified Extensible Firmware Interface

Startup items

On Apple computers, startup items are executed during boot up. They usually have configuration information that informs the MacOS what execution order to use. However, they...