Introduction
Project Background
In today's dynamic digital landscape, cyber threats continually evolve, becoming increasingly sophisticated. The agility and precision of a cybersecurity response can spell the difference between a brief hiccup and a significant debacle. For many enterprises, spotting and addressing these threats necessitate a synergized, expert, and prompt action.
On June 27th, Compuquip's Security Operations Center (SOC) detected an unusual activity alert at 2pm. A domain administrator, not known for such activities, was enabling Remote Desktop access to a server. This raised immediate red flags as the action diverged from the customer's usual patterns.
Methodology & Immediate Actions:
Incident Bridge Initiation: By 4pm, an incident bridge was opened to intensively monitor, analyze, deploy forensic tools, and counteract the threat.
In-depth Investigation: A legitimate vendor account was identified as the entry point. The attacker exhibited high sophistication—rapidly targeting specific vulnerabilities, escalating privileges, and crafting custom malware designed to evade Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems. Additionally, they established a Command and Control (C2) system over encrypted SSL traffic to hide its signatures, indicating a well-coordinated and potentially large-scale attack. This C2 infrastructure has been laying dormant (redirected to Google) for over a year until the attackers felt they had the right target to use it on. This infrastructure consisted of 2 servers with clean IPs hosted on a cloud provider not known to host C2 infrastructure before.
Results
Speedy Containment: The breach was fully contained within 36 hours of its inception, and impressively, just 24 hours from the initial alert.
Thorough Analysis: Twelve servers were meticulously investigated to ensure no residues of the breach remained and to reinforce security measures against future threats. Over all, the team collected and analyzed over 250 GB of forensic data.
Team Effort: The rapid response and containment was a result of relentless teamwork. Over six dedicated Team members worked round-the-clock to secure the client's digital infrastructure.
