Playbook Objectives:
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- To evaluate the security team’s ability to detect, analyze, and respond to sophisticated cyber deception tactics.
- To enhance the company’s defense mechanisms by exposing them to simulated advanced persistent threats (APTs) and deceptive techniques.
- To train the IT and cybersecurity personnel in implementing proactive measures and developing adaptive defense strategies against deceptive cyber-attacks.
Difficulty Level:
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- Advanced
Scenario:
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- Company: Initech Corp, a leading fintech company providing online banking and financial management services.
- Initech Corp has recently observed an increase in sophisticated cyber-attacks targeting financial institutions. With the stakes higher than ever, the company decides to proactively strengthen its cyber defenses.
- Concerns: Growing threats of APTs, potential data breaches, financial fraud, and service disruption.
- The simulation involves the Initech Corp’s network, made up of multiple servers hosting critical financial data, an array of workstations used by staff, and cloud services for customer data management.
- The cyber range exercise is set up to emulate Initech Corp’s network and systems accurately, complete with decoy servers, honeypots, and mock financial data to make the scenario realistic.
- Employees Involved: Initech Corp’s CISO Jane Doe oversees the exercise, with Lead Security Analyst John Smith coordinating the security team’s efforts during the simulation.
- The scenario unfolds with the security team being alerted to suspicious activity suggesting a breach attempt. The team must identify and evaluate the threat, engage in threat hunting, and deploy deception tactics to understand the attackers’ methodologies and intentions.
Category:
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- Cybersecurity Deception Techniques
- Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Simulation
- Incident Response and Threat Intelligence
Exercise Attack Steps:
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- Initial Breach: The attack begins with phishing emails sent to a few select employees, containing malicious attachments designed to establish a foothold within Initech’s network.
- Lateral Movement: As the attackers compromise an initial system, they begin to move laterally across the network, attempting to reach the finance department’s servers.
- Deployment of Deception Tactics: Initech’s cyber defense team deploys a range of deceptive elements throughout their network, including honeypots, fake data repositories, and decoy systems to mislead the attackers.
- Detection and Analysis: With the deceptive defenses in place, the security team uses network monitoring tools and threat intelligence to detect unusual activity indicative of the attackers interacting with the deception environment.
- Response and Mitigation: The attack simulation progresses to allow the security team to engage in real-time incident response, utilizing the intelligence gathered from the attackers’ interaction with the deceptive elements to neutralize the threat.
- Forensic Analysis: Toward the end of the exercise, the team conducts a forensic analysis to uncover the breach’s full extent, identifying any compromised systems and data.
- Strategy Adaptation: Based on the observations and outcomes of the exercise, Initech Corp’s security team develops a set of strategic adjustments to their cyber deception tactics, ensuring improved detection and response to actual attacks in the future.
