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

16. Other Books You May Enjoy

Investigation of Group Policy for ransomware deployment

Another technique that's becoming more and more common among ransomware affiliates is Group Policy modification for ransomware deployment.

In most cases, the network is fully compromised, so it's not a big deal for the threat actors to move laterally to a domain controller and abuse Group Policy to execute ransomware enterprise-wide.

What's more, some ransomware samples have built-in capabilities to use Group Policy modification for self-distribution. A good example is LockBit ransomware.

You can use a similar technique we covered previously: find the first ransom note and start checking what happened before it was created. In this case, we can see that a very suspicious Group Policy Object (GPO) was created:

Figure 11.15 – Group Policy Object created by LockBit ransomware

As we can see, there's a new object created with the Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) {E97EFF8F...