Advanced Incident Response, Threat Hunting, and Digital Forensics

Threat hunting and Incident response tactics and procedures have evolved rapidly over the past several years. Your team can no longer afford to use antiquated incident response and threat hunting techniques that fail to properly identify compromised systems. The key is to constantly look for attacks that get past security systems, and to catch intrusions in progress, rather than after attackers have completed their objectives and done worse damage to the organization. For the incident responder, this process is known as "threat hunting" . FOR508 teaches advanced skills to hunt, identify, counter, and recover from a wide range of threats within enterprise networks, including APT nation-state adversaries, organized crime syndicates, and hactivists.

What You Will Learn

ADVANCED THREATS ARE IN YOUR NETWORK - IT'S TIME TO GO HUNTING!

FOR508: Advanced Incident Response and Threat Hunting Course will help you to:

• Detect how and when a breach occurred
• Identify compromised and affected systems
• Perform damage assessments and determine what was stolen or changed
• Contain and remediate incidents
• Develop key sources of threat intelligence
• Hunt down additional breaches using knowledge of the adversary

DAY 0: A 3-letter government agency contacts you to say an advanced threat group is targeting organizations like yours, and that your organization is likely a target. They won't tell how they know, but they suspect that there are already several breached systems within your enterprise. An advanced persistent threat, aka an APT, is likely involved. This is the most sophisticated threat that you are likely to face in your efforts to defend your systems and data, and these adversaries may have been actively rummaging through your network undetected for months or even years.

This is a hypothetical situation, but the chances are very high that hidden threats already exist inside your organization's networks. Organizations can't afford to believe that their security measures are perfect and impenetrable, no matter how thorough their security precautions might be. Prevention systems alone are insufficient to counter focused human adversaries who know how to get around most security and monitoring tools.

The key is to constantly look for attacks that get past security systems, and to catch intrusions in progress, rather than after attackers have completed their objectives and done significant damage to the organization. For the incident responder, this process is known as "threat hunting". Threat hunting uses known adversary behaviors to proactively examine the network and endpoints in order to identify new data breaches.

Threat hunting and Incident response tactics and procedures have evolved rapidly over the past several years. Your team can no longer afford to use antiquated incident response and threat hunting techniques that fail to properly identify compromised systems, provide ineffective containment of the breach, and ultimately fail to rapidly remediate the incident. Incident response and threat hunting teams are the keys to identifying and observing malware indicators and patterns of activity in order to generate accurate threat intelligence that can be used to detect current and future intrusions.

This in-depth incident response and threat hunting course provides responders and threat hunting teams with advanced skills to hunt down, identify, counter, and recover from a wide range of threats within enterprise networks, including APT nation-state adversaries, organized crime syndicates, and hacktivists. Constantly updated, FOR508: Advanced Incident Response and Threat Hunting addresses today's incidents by providing hands-on incident response and threat hunting tactics and techniques that elite responders and hunters are successfully using to detect, counter, and respond to real-world breach cases.

The course uses a hands-on enterprise intrusion lab -- modeled after a real-world targeted APT attack on an enterprise network and based on APT group tactics to target a network -- to lead you to challenges and solutions via extensive use of the SIFT Workstation and best-of-breed investigative tools.

During the intrusion and threat hunting lab exercises, you will identify where the initial targeted attack occurred and how the adversary is moving laterally through multiple compromised systems. You will also extract and create crucial cyber threat intelligence that can help you properly scope the compromise and detect future breaches.

During a targeted attack, an organization needs the best incident response team in the field. FOR508: Advanced Incident Response and Threat Hunting will train you and your team to respond, detect, scope, and stop intrusions and data breaches.

GATHER YOUR INCIDENT RESPONSE TEAM - IT'S TIME TO GO HUNTING

FOR508 Course Topics

• Advanced use of a wide range of best-of-breed open-source tools and the SIFT Workstation to perform incident response and digital forensics.
• Hunting and responding to advanced adversaries such as nation-state actors, organized crime, and hacktivists.
• Threat hunting techniques that will aid in quicker identification of breaches.
• Rapid incident response analysis and breach assessment.
• Incident response and intrusion forensics methodology.
• Remote and enterprise incident response system analysis.
• Windows live incident response and scaling collection of triage data.
• Investigating and countering living of the land attacks, including PowerShell and WMI.
• Memory analysis during incident response and threat hunting.
• Transitioning memory analysis skills to enterprise detection and response (EDR) platforms
• Detailed instruction on compromise and protection of Windows enterprise credentials.
• Internal lateral movement analysis and detection.
• Rapid and deep-dive timeline creation and analysis.
• Volume shadow copy exploitation for hunting threats and incident response.
• Detection of anti-forensics and adversary hiding techniques.
• Discovery of unknown malware on a system.
• Adversary threat intelligence development, indicators of compromise, and usage.
• Cyber-kill chain strategies.
• Step-by-step tactics and procedures to respond to and investigate intrusion cases

Hands-On Training

One of the biggest complaints you hear in the threat hunting and incident response community is the lack of realistic intrusion data. Most real-world intrusion data are simply too sensitive to be shared.

The FOR508 course authors created a realistic scenario based on experiences surveyed from a panel of responders who regularly combat targeted APT attacks. They helped review and guide the targeted attack "script" used to create the scenario. The result is an incredibly rich and realistic attack scenario across multiple enterprise systems. This APT attack lab forms the basis for training during the week. The network was set up to mimic a standard "protected" enterprise network using standard compliance checklists:

• Full auditing turned on per recommended Federal Information Security Management Act guidelines
• Windows domain controller (DC) set up and configured; DC hardened similarly to what is seen in real enterprise networks
• Systems installed with the real software on them that is used (Office, Adobe, Skype, Tweetdeck, Email, Dropbox, Firefox, Chrome)
• Fully patched systems (patches are automatically installed)
• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents
• Enterprise A/V and on-scan capability based on the Department of Defense's Host-based Security System
  • Endpoint Protection Software - Anti-virus, Anti-spyware, Safe surfing, Anti-spam, Device Control, Onsite Management, Host Intrusion Prevention (HIPS)
• Firewall only allows inbound port 25 and outbound ports 25, 80, 443

This exercise and challenge are used to show real adversary traces across host systems, system memory, hibernation/pagefiles, and more:

• Phase 1 - Patient zero compromise and malware C2 beacon installation
• Phase 2 - Privilege escalation, lateral movement to other systems, malware utilities download, installation of additional beacons, and obtaining domain admin credentials
• Phase 3 - Search for intellectual property, profile network, dump email, dump enterprise hashes
• Phase 4 - Collect data to exfiltrate and copy to staging system. Archive data using .rar and a complex passphrase
• Phase 5 - Exfiltrate .rar files from staging server, perform cleanup on staging server

You Will Be Able To

• Learn and master the tools, techniques, and procedures necessary to effectively hunt, detect, and contain a variety of adversaries and to remediate incidents.
• Detect and hunt unknown live, dormant, and custom malware in memory across multiple Windows systems in an enterprise environment.
• Hunt through and perform incident response across hundreds of unique systems simultaneously using PowerShell or F-Response Enterprise and the SIFT Workstation.
• Identify and track malware beaconing outbound to its command and control (C2) channel via memory forensics, registry analysis, and network connection residue.
• Determine how the breach occurred by identifying the beachhead and initial attack mechanisms.
• Identify living of the land techniques, inluduing malicious use of PowerShell and WMI.
• Target advanced adversary anti-forensics techniques like hidden and time-stomped malware, along with utility-ware used to move in the network and maintain an attacker's presence.
• Use memory analysis, incident response, and threat hunting tools in the SIFT Workstation to detect hidden processes, malware, attacker command lines, rootkits, network connections, and more.
• Track user and attacker activity second-by-second on the system you are analyzing through in-depth timeline and super-timeline analysis.
• Recover data cleared using anti-forensics techniques via Volume Shadow Copy and Restore Point analysis.
• Identify lateral movement and pivots within your enterprise across your endpoints, showing how attackers transition from system to system without detection.
• Understand how the attacker can acquire legitimate credentials - including domain administrator rights - even in a locked-down environment.
• Track data movement as the attackers collect critical data and shift them to exfiltration collection points.
• Recover and analyze archives and .rar files used by APT-like attackers to exfiltrate sensitive data from the enterprise network.
• Use collected data to perform effective remediation across the entire enterprise.

Syllabus (36 CPEs)