Adversarial Tradecraft in Cybersecurity

Master cutting-edge techniques and countermeasures to protect your organization from live hackers. Learn how to harness cyber deception in your operations to gain an edge over the competition.Key FeaturesGain an advantage against live hackers in a competition or real computing environmentUnderstand advanced red team and blue team techniques with code examplesLearn to battle in short-term memory, whether remaining unseen (red teams) or monitoring an attacker's traffic (blue teams)Book Description

Little has been written about what to do when live hackers are on your system and running amok. Even experienced hackers tend to choke up when they realize the network defender has caught them and is zoning in on their implants in real time. This book will provide tips and tricks all along the kill chain of an attack, showing where hackers can have the upper hand in a live conflict and how defenders can outsmart them in this adversarial game of computer cat and mouse.

This book contains two subsections in each chapter, specifically focusing on the offensive and defensive teams. It begins by introducing you to adversarial operations and principles of computer conflict where you will explore the core principles of deception, humanity, economy, and more about human-on-human conflicts. Additionally, you will understand everything from planning to setting up infrastructure and tooling that both sides should have in place.

Throughout this book, you will learn how to gain an advantage over opponents by disappearing from what they can detect. You will further understand how to blend in, uncover other actors' motivations and means, and learn to tamper with them to hinder their ability to detect your presence. Finally, you will learn how to gain an advantage through advanced research and thoughtfully concluding an operation.

By the end of this book, you will have achieved a solid understanding of cyberattacks from both an attacker's and a defender's perspective.What you will learnUnderstand how to implement process injection and how to detect itTurn the tables on the offense with active defenseDisappear on the defender's system, by tampering with defensive sensorsUpskill in using deception with your backdoors and countermeasures including honeypotsKick someone else from a computer you are on and gain the upper handAdopt a language agnostic approach to become familiar with techniques that can be applied to both the red and blue teamsPrepare yourself for real-time cybersecurity conflict by using some of the best techniques currently in the industryWho this book is for

Pentesters to red teamers, security operations center analysts to incident responders, attackers, defenders, general hackers, advanced computer users, and security engineers will benefit from this book. Participants in purple teaming or adversarial simulations will also learn a lot from its practical examples of processes for gaining an advantage over the opposing team.

Basic knowledge of Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, system administration as well as knowledge of incident response in Linux and prior exposure to any kind of cybersecurity knowledge, penetration testing, and ethical hacking basics will help you follow along.Table of ContentsTheory on Adversarial Operations and Principles of Computer ConflictPreparing for BattleInvisible is Best (Operating in Memory)Blending InActive ManipulationReal-Time ConflictThe Research AdvantageClearing the Field