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