Investigate Three

 Analysis 


In this post, I explain analysis and the associated techniques to mean at the lowest possible level a human’s ability to consume external stimulus of its near-infinite complexity and produce thoughtful and data-backed decisions.

Within our industry, we are plagued with information twisted and corrupted by entities wishing to profit, As such this is where your analysis starts as a human. At every moment at every crossroad, you must take a data point and allow it to flower into thousands of other thoughts, then you must evaluate each subsequent thought and draw a line back to “what is already” known, The further away the thought the thinner the line back to known but the greater room the flower to bloom. That is to say don’t discount radical ideas.

When presented with an alert security vendors expend significant energy into putting “options” available to the individual reviewing the alert. In general, there will never be an option you should not explore what is key is evaluating the options to what you already know (drawing the ling back) and asking yourself if is this the best possible option to go with first.

With what’s often described as low-hanging fruit those options that you can consciously recall aiding you a benefit in the past maybe the best option but were those options picked last time just because they were new or do you have documentation?


Dilemma

This dilemma will exist with all analysts as they are presented with options and avenues to explore beyond their reach and understanding or even maybe time. 





Analysis & Triage


The above screenshot of an incomplete alert page has approximately 30 different buttons or options for you to explore. You wouldn’t want to click literally every single one so how do you get to where you need to be. What do you see!



Tool Knowledge

First and foremost equip yourself with a tool and understand all its facets and features, understand when an option will work and how your expecting it to behave, options are grouped together by types as assigned by UX/UI developers so identify where those groups are to get to other options faster.


Investigative Questions

These are the queries you ask of the data you have retrieved whether this is literal data in a computer system or visualizations and graphics as part of interfaces. To begin we can start as simple as possible:

What is this alert about?

Well, the top heading on the page under the option ‘Manage Alert’ details “Possible theft of passwords and other sensitive browser information”. With this information, we know immediately the adversary is already on the system and information such as credit cards and corporate authentication information may be at risk.

We also know that browsers keep their data in sqlite databases in directories like LocalAppData\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Login Data. So Already we have have our first investigative question and a strong lead to pursue

Were there any interactions with sensitive browser locations?

If so was activity observed on any other assets?


Were further payloads delivered to the system?

We know that adversaries often rely on low-sophistication techniques to pass initial access and establish a foothold to ensure they are not prevented too early into their kill chain so other files being involved is likely. Selecting the alert within the timeline reveals other binaries



Now we have a collection of new questions to explore

What operations have the newly found files done?

What information can we gather on the IP address?

And with that, we have already established 6 investigative questions to explore further and add to your triage notes.



What makes a good investigative question?

Investigative questions that are comprised of already enumerated information and recognition of patterns are the heart of a complete investigation. Investigative questions can be divided into two primary groups

 

What is that?


These investigative questions aim to give you information that previously made you feel like you were not currently equipped to arrive at causality, they contribute to a concrete foundation from other questions and even declarations can stand. Common examples of these questions are “Does this file or address have known threat intelligence against it” or “Is the file new to the system”

 

I wonder if?
 

These investigative questions serve to play to your own creativity and intuitiveness, for example, its universally shared persistence is an incredibly common adversary objective so you may ask yourself where could that be established on your system or preceding that thought where would an adversary give away were they kept their persistence perhaps a temp file or command line history

 

Applying what you know an adversary could do and your own expertise as to what adversaries have done will defeat most incidents.


Its Grasp on You

As an analyst performing analysis, especially during what is perceived to be a major incident you have to achieve the quality of thought and considerations of facts at a pace not often expected of humans in any other situations. Personally, it feels like I injected adrenaline into my thigh (I'm addicted). Fortunately, analysis during a live engagement has only four focuses and these are listed in priority:

Get to a reasonable statement of facts quickly

In the most immediate possible instance you need a minor conclusion on to what you can see is happening and the criticality of the events. Usually, it's pretty easy to gather scope and or a patient 0 so ensure that is captured in your initial notification of a major breach. This first statement needs to remain unified when communicated by any party and discrepancies should be highlighted

Discover adversary behaviour in detail

At this point, you will want to prioritize speed over accuracy but do ensure you can look back at what you have recorded and have enough metadata to justify its inclusion.

Create a formal timeline

Once you have gathered the information and validated its relevancy add each item to a list in chronological order.

Formulate a summary of events

Ensure you review the data you have and begin detailing what the adversary achieved, what they looked to achieve further and if possible what their final objective likely was. It is also important not to fill in gaps where data doesn’t exist and instead articulate those gaps with recommendations to prevent the occurrence in the future.








Popular

Endpoint on Adrenaline : One

Image
Introduction   This blog series will capture how to maximise the protection of an endpoint using the various technologies in the Defender suite. The controls outlined in the series will each need to have their own considerations taken into account for a given environment but hopefully at a minimum it will be clear just how powerful of an offering Microsoft has.  Unfortunately due to the highly modular and distinct diversity in controls Microsoft offers things are often overlooked and misconfigured when tests are conducted. With this in mind, the shortest possible route to a solution for this is utilizing the recommendations, CSPM and Secure Score technology contained within Defender 365 and Defender for Cloud as it will automatically conduct posture assessments and inform you of things you have missed and may want to turn on (IE dont take these recommendations lightly) Lastly, I would recommend reading the book “Defender for Endpoint in depth” from packt as it showcases the complexitie
Read more

Brilliance in the Basics

Image
Introduction Tired of watching you and your friends get compromised, do exactly what's in this blog and start beating adversaries. Avoiding the memes adversaries win because of simple mistakes and neglect and we all already know what they are so I'm going to list them for you. Its all for free too. Enumerate To put it simply, there shouldn't be anything you don't know about your environment, you should know who all your users are, where all your electronic devices are and what they do, what applications you have and what versions they are. Enumeration is the jet fuel for making good defensive decisions. I wrote about how to enumerate your environment here  Securing your estate: The First Step (goblinloot.net) . Follow these steps and become the arbitrator of your own environment  Your perimeter is a bridge, not a wall Monitor your perimeter as best as you can but always assume it has already been defeated. Monitor endpoint system and process telemetry and southwest traf
Read more

Investigate

Image
  Introduction This document details how an analyst should conduct investigations and triage in the normal duties of their job. It will describe concepts and logic that enable analysts to look at data, ask investigative questions, evaluate those questions and arrive at assertions about what they have found. An Alert For the most part, analysts begin their investigative work when an alert is generated. Alerts are fantastic because they are a statement that something has happened and something needs to be done about it. Typically alerts are filled with information that an analyst can then use in their investigation. Alerts are generated by detections and these detections can come in many shapes and sizes. Some just look for a particular action like someone unlocking their car door, others might have access to more context like someone who isn’t the owner of the car unlocking the door. Going even further some detections might look at how the car door was opened or at what
Read more

Endpoint on Adrenaline 3

Image
Introduction Now that I have covered the advanced features obtained from Defender for Cloud and the complexities of Defender for Endpoint with the objective of delivering as much protection as possible to the endpoint, I will now explore how to expand on this greatly and open up even more use cases. Microsoft Sentinel This technology will allow us to unify and correlate data generated by other controls. I have decided to deploy Microsoft Sentinel into 4 primary categories : System Administrator - Asset Uptime, Application Inventory, Device configuration and Troubleshooting Network Engineers - Netflow and session traffic, violations and alerts for potential issues Threat Detection - Analytics and playbooks Threat hunting - Workbooks & Machine learning Using Microsoft Sentinel we can achieve a plethora of incredibly powerful use cases with Defender 365 endpoint data. Below is an illustration of how my SIEM works to enable analysts to prevent and detect threats Data Sources In order t
Read more

Writing detections when stuck with EDR

Image
Introduction Making the leap to purchasing and maintaining an EDR solution can be huge for organisations so huge in fact that they never really progress from there when it comes to visibility on assets. This is an important consideration because organisations should aim to achieve some level of detection engineering but will likely never get to explore the associated complexities. So how can organisations effectively and easily write detections that actually help to protect them when they are only able to leverage an EDR tool. Understanding your tools limitations To most people EDR tools are incredibly verbose in the telemetry they capture from any given asset but unfortunately relative to overall telemetry available they actually only capture what the vendors think is the most pertinent. This is for obvious reasons because ingesting telemetry at the scale vendors do comes at a significant cost so they implement "cost-saving measures" like limiting the amount of any one given
Read more

Endpoint on Adrenaline Two

Image
Introduction Continuing on from my last post that captured using Defender for Cloud to gain powerful additional features on top of defender for endpoint to protect your endpoints we are going to take a closer look at Defender for Endpoint itself and extend into some endpoint-specific use cases for Defender for Identity that tie directly back into Defender for Endpoint. Firstly a really important consideration when configuring Defender for Endpoint is that alot of the heavy lifting from a prevention standpoint actually happens in Defender Anti virus. This means that while im going to briefly cover some settings to make sure Defender Anti Virus isnt hindering Defender for Endpoint im going to reserve further Defender Anti Virus controls to the next part in this series. This also of course means that when your doing your own testing just installing the MSSense agent (What you get from the scripts, intune etc) is actually not Defender for Endpoint in its totality so you simply can not m
Read more

Investigate Two

Image
Introductions How you as an analyst handle true positives is life and death in the eyes of potential victims. Traditionally the industry elected to prioritize overzealousness and sending more than not to cover their failings, This however is no different to guesses and it is possible to arrive at strong data-backed decisions on events that could be the compromise of an estate True Positive True positives exist at the heart of all our jobs, they are what we wake up for in the morning and why we endlessly pursue understanding how to protect our clients. The strictest possible definition of true positive is where an outcome of a prediction or model is returned true. This broad definition is important because the assumption carried with a predication or model can change. As an example many security technologies aim to identify when an application often unwanted by an organization is present within a system, these are commonly dubbed PUPs. (Potentially Unwanted Programs). The general cons
Read more

Standardized Note Taking Format For Analysts

Image
  Introduction This post outlines a format for note-taking designed to aid analysts and ensure the knowledge they acquire over time is kept so that it can easily be consumed later. This format is designed to be technology agnostic so it can be applied to a note-taking tool or platform of the analyst’s choice. I designed this format because analysts often received what you could call unplanned information whereby at any given moment during their day they could learn something highly impactful to their role via any medium. This really exasperates the need for good note-taking practices for analysts. Illustrated above is the wireframe that analysts can implement into their note-taking platforms. Each section contains sub-sections that allow for different knowledge to remain segregated and more searchable. Meeting Notes Within any given week analysts can have countless meetings and so it is important to note down items from meetings for future review. Not every meeting needs to be capt
Read more

Securing your estate: The First Step

Introduction A commonly forgotten fact within the cybersecurity industry is that most organizations are not equipped nor have started to form any sort of security program. This is the case for many reasons because most organizations are SMBs so they don't and likely will never have funds to purchase people and technology and the fact that the cybersecurity industry is incredibly toxic for low expertise and or low capability teams as the well of knowledge we all rely on has been poisoned by vendors and 'thought leaders'. With this in mind, I have created a small resource that will guide you through what you need to do to make a start. This resource won't reference vendors and I will try to avoid specific jargon. Enumerate The term 'You can't secure what you don't know' stands strong even to this day and should be your primary focus before you do anything else. Understanding what assets, you have both physically (computer hardware) and logically (applicati
Read more

Attack Simulations for your SOC

Image
 Introduction SOC analysts spend 99 percent of their time looking at the same data and patterns over and over again. They develop muscle memory that helps them use their platforms without much effort but also in grains in them potentially poor practices. Most analysts are new to the industry and are taking certifications like CompTIA Cysa+ and Azure SC200 but none of these certifications teach them what genuine malicious actions look like. So how do you train a team of people how to detect malicious activity and respond in the ever-morphing threat landscape? You throw them through the ring of fire. You make them triage real (as close as possible) incidents and appropriately monitor their behavior and progress to tune the processes perpetually. Analysts are arguably the single most important role within a SOC, they carry the burden of triaging alerts and correctly identifying whether malicious activity is occurring. They are the first, middle and last line of defense. However, despite t
Read more