Understanding the Cybersecurity Kill Chain

In Chapter 3, What is a Cyber Strategy?, you learned about the incident response process and how it fits into the overall enhancement of a company's security posture. Now it is time to start thinking as a Threat Actor to better understand the rationale, the motivation, and the steps of performing an attack. We call this the cybersecurity kill chain, which is something that we briefly covered in Chapter 1, Security Posture.

Today, the most advanced cyber attacks are reported to involve intrusions inside a target's network that last a long time before doing damage or being discovered. This reveals a unique characteristic of today's Threat Actors: they have an astounding ability to remain undetected until the time is right. This means that they operate on well-structured and scheduled plans. The precision of their attacks has been under study and has revealed that most cyber Threat Actors use a series of similar phases to...