Saturday, November 30, 2019

The Luck Factor In Incident Response


When malware passes through the perimeter and internal network controls, it’s going to land on something. That something is most often some sort of endpoint whether a server or user machine. 




Malware that lands on an endpoint as a result of a broad blind attack, the attacker most likely won’t know what machine it’s on, what privileges it has, or where it can easily laterally move. For some destructive attacks, this isn’t important but for many attackers, establishing basic information is.



You’ll never know how long you’ll have before an attacker goes to work or the actions that they’ll take. But, there are some actions that they’ll need to take to exploit their position. Many of these are noisy and easily alerted upon….if you are looking for them.


The blue team should not believe in luck and certainly shouldn’t rely on luck as a planning factor in incident response. That said, if the speed of a organized and focused response to these alerts is confused with luck and that’s what the team, the business, or our attacker wants to call it, your blue team should be fine with that. If the attacker doesn’t avail themselves of a potentially open opportunity before those doors are closed as part of the response, we should be fine with that too. 


Ok, upon rethinking the scenario of an attacker not availing themselves of an open opportunity, perhaps there is a bit of luck in incident response. 


It happens. 


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