Incident Response

This package consists of CYRIN labs focusing on the NIST National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Incident Response specialty area. Completing these labs will help you learn the skills needed for a job in the area.

Prerequisites vary by lab, but are generally: familiarity with the Unix/Linux command line and basic networking concepts (TCP/IP, DNS, etc.).

EXPECTED DURATION

14.0 hours, self-paced. Pause and continue at any time.
14.0 CPEs awarded on successful completion.

• DoS Attacks and Defenses

  This lab teaches three different Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and techniques to mitigate them:

  1. A TCP SYN Flood attack that exploits a weakness in the design of the TCP transport protocol,
  2. A slow HTTP attack called Slowloris that takes advantage of how HTTP servers work, and
  3. A DNS amplification attack that exploits misconfigured DNS servers, of which there are plenty on the Internet.

• Protocol Analysis I: Wireshark Basics

  Where do you begin in network traffic analysis? Learn the process for examining a live or pre-recorded packet capture file using graphical tools such as Wireshark. Is there malicious activity? Learn to think like an attacker, going through the same methods the attacker would, to assess whether what you’re seeing is “normal” or signs of an attack. At the same time, students will run basic network scans using nmap, while seeing how they appear in Wireshark. Finally, students will analyze packet traces indicative of HTTP-based attacks.

• Protocol Analysis II: Extracting Data from Network Traffic

  Build on what you learned in Protocol Analysis I, this time using command line tools and techniques. You will use the ubiquitous tcpdump program, starting with simple capture tasks and then building up to complex filtering and display options. In the process, you will dig deeply into TCP and IP header fields, learning how these can be used to find the traffic you’re interested in. You will examine ICMP, SSH, and HTTP traffic, including that from web shells commonly used in attacks. With the techniques learned in this exercise, you will be able to gather and filter packet capture data from server systems, then later process it on graphical security operations workstations.

• Analyzing Potential Malware

  Students will learn to use the Cuckoo sandbox to determine if an executable or document is potential malware. If the executable is packed (compressed), they will learn to use a debugger to unpack it.

• Detect and Neutralize a Malware-Based Attack

  In this exercise, the student plays the role of a security admin of an enterprise network. They are asked to investigate a potential malware-based attack.

  The student is told that an intrusion detection system has seen periodic outgoing connections from a computer within the enterprise network to a computer on the Internet. The student must block the outgoing traffic, determine the computer from which the traffic is originating, find the malware on that computer, examine it to see what information is being sent out, and stop the attack.

• ICS OT Man in the Middle Attack

  Would you know if a device on your Operational Technology (OT) network was compromised on its way from the factory to you? Or if a contractor inadvertently installed some malware that didn’t activate until months later?

  This scenario presents just such an attack on the OT network—one of the existing devices on the network is intercepting and modifying SCADA traffic. It could be producing false measurements, or be sending commands to an unsuspecting device on behalf of the SCADA Server!

• ICS IT/OT Phishing Attack

  It only takes one user clicking on a phishing e-mail to launch a devastating attack. Successful phishing attempts give an attacker access to your IT network resources, and possibly your OT network as well.

  This scenario presents just such an attack—one of the users on the IT side of the network has inadvertently opened a malicious e-mail attachment. What are the consequences to the IT and OT networks, and how can this be contained and neutralized?

• ICS OT Application-Level DoS Attack

  A Denial of Service (DoS) attack can cripple your business operations, or do even worse to your physical infrastructure. This scenario presents just such an attack on the OT network—a DoS attack at the application layer, aimed at disrupting normal operations. How will you find and stop such an attack?

  This scenario presents just such an attack on the OT network—a DoS attack at the application layer, aimed at disrupting normal operations.

• ICS OT Network-Level DoS Attack

  A Denial of Service (DoS) attack can cripple your business operations, or do even worse to your physical infrastructure. This scenario presents just such an attack on the OT network—a DoS attack at the network layer, flooding your systems with bogus data and slowing operations to a crawl. How will your personnel perform when the system is in a degraded state?