You're reading from Incident Response Techniques for Ransomware Attacks Understand modern ransomware attacks and build an incident response strategy to work through them

Product type Paperback

Published in Apr 2022

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781803240442

Length 228 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Concepts

Cybersecurity

Author (1):

Oleg Skulkin

View More author details

Table of Contents (17) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Getting Started with a Modern Ransomware Attack

2. Chapter 1: The History of Human-Operated Ransomware Attacks FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: The Life Cycle of a Human-Operated Ransomware Attack

4. Chapter 3: The Incident Response Process

5. Section 2: Know Your Adversary: How Ransomware Gangs Operate

6. Chapter 4: Cyber Threat Intelligence and Ransomware

7. Chapter 5: Understanding Ransomware Affiliates' Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures

8. Chapter 6: Collecting Ransomware-Related Cyber Threat Intelligence

9. Section 3: Practical Incident Response

10. Chapter 7: Digital Forensic Artifacts and Their Main Sources

11. Chapter 8: Investigating Initial Access Techniques

12. Chapter 9: Investigating Post-Exploitation Techniques

13. Chapter 10: Investigating Data Exfiltration Techniques

14. Chapter 11: Investigating Ransomware Deployment Techniques

15. Chapter 12: The Unified Ransomware Kill Chain

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Investigating reconnaissance techniques

As you'll remember, one of the main goals of threat actors is to encrypt as many hosts as possible, so they need to collect information about the network they got into. They may just scan it to obtain information about remote hosts, or use various Active Directory reconnaissance tools, such as AdFind or ADRecon.

Network scanning

Through the analysis of SRUM artifacts, we already collected information about an executable named netscan.exe. Based on this information, we may already suspect that this file was used by ransomware affiliates for network scanning.

First, we need to understand where it is located. We already have $MFT parsed, so let's start from it. MFT analysis allows you to understand better which artifacts may be useful for further investigation and look at the attack from a filesystem perspective.

Figure 9.9 – Path to netscan.exe obtained from $MFT

Now we can see that netscan.exe...