Playbook Objectives:
- To test and enhance the incident response team’s ability to detect, respond to, and contain a zero-day exploit targeting the company’s critical infrastructure.
- To identify gaps in the current security posture that could be exploited by a zero-day attack.
- To reevaluate the effectiveness of the company’s existing detection tools and containment strategies under a controlled environment.
- To provide a hands-on experience to the security team in dealing with a sophisticated, unknown threat, enabling them to improve their skills.
Difficulty Level:
- Advanced: This exercise is designed for a seasoned cybersecurity team with experience in threat detection, network security, and incident response.
Scenario:
- Company Name: FinSecure Inc.
- Description: A prominent financial service provider with a multinational clientele, known for its robust and secure online transaction platform.
- Network Infrastructure: A complex network with multiple layers including, user access networks, a corporate data center, a mix of public and private cloud services, encrypted data pipelines, and a dedicated network operations center. A hybrid workforce model with extensive remote access capabilities is in place.
- Profile of Attack: A suspected zero-day exploit has been identified in the company’s remote desktop services used by employees. This flaw allows an attacker to remotely execute code with system-level privileges without any user interaction. Given the widespread use of remote services due to the hybrid workforce setup, this vulnerability poses a significant risk to the company’s data confidentiality and integrity.
Category:
- Incident Response and Management
- Zero-Day Detection and Mitigation
- Advanced Persistent Threat Containment
Exercise Attack Steps:
- Initial Breach Notification:
- A mock alert is generated by an IDS (Intrusion Detection System), indicating unusual system-level activities on several remote desktop servers.
- The incident response team is convened to assess the alarm.
- Identification of the Threat:
- The security analysts begin to sift through the logs and traffic to characterize the nature of the activity.
- Initial suspicion is raised towards a zero-day exploit due to the lack of corresponding security patches or prior knowledge of the observed behavior.
- Containment Protocol Activation:
- A decision is taken to isolate affected servers from the network without disrupting critical business operations.
- The team deploys a series of pre-planned countermeasures including traffic segmentation, application of stringent firewall rules, and temporary suspension of certain services.
- Forensic Analysis:
- Forensic specialists start to gather artifacts from compromised systems to understand the scope and mechanism of the breach.
- Virtual sandboxes are employed to safely dissect the exploit code, aiming to understand the exploit triggers and payload.
- Assessment and Improvement of Detection Capabilities:
- The team evaluates whether existing security systems can be tuned to detect such exploits.
- Simulation of the zero-day attack is executed repeatedly with adjustments to the IDS signatures and anomaly detection baselines to measure improvements.
- Communication and Documentation:
- Clear communication protocols are established for briefing executive leadership and relevant stakeholders on the current status.
- Documenting each action and decision helps in creating an after-action report that feeds into the improvement of future response processes.
- Restoration and Recovery:
- Plans for restoring services and data integrity are made while ensuring no remnants of the exploit remain.
- Data backups are carefully examined and selectively reintroduced into the network environment.
- Lessons Learned and Playbook Update:
- After successfully containing the exploit, the team reviews the timeline of events, decision points, and action effectiveness.
- The final step involves updating the zero-day exploit containment playbook with new insights, strategies, and remediation steps that yielded the best results.
