Understanding the Cybersecurity Kill Chain

In the last chapter, 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 like an attacker and 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, Secure 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 attackers: they have an astounding ability to remain undetected until the time is right. This means that they operate on well-structured and scheduled plans. There have been studies carried out on the precision of their attacks, which have revealed that most cyber attackers use a series of similar phases to pull off successful...