This lab focuses on investigating a sophisticated cyberattack involving lateral movement, privilege escalation, and ransomware deployment across a corporate network. The attack chain demonstrates advanced tactics employed by threat actors to compromise multiple systems, maintain persistence, and execute malicious payloads. Using tools such as Event Log Explorer and CyberChef, we will analyze key events, uncover critical evidence, and trace the attacker’s steps.
The investigation begins with identifying the initial compromise on a domain controller, where malicious services were remotely installed, and default accounts were targeted through brute force attacks. We then follow the attacker’s lateral movement to other systems where they enabled risky configurations, injected processes, and dumped credentials to escalate privileges. Moving further, we analyze how the attacker disabled Windows Defender on critical systems, deployed backdoors, and utilized PowerShell scripts and registry modifications to maintain stealth and persistence.
Throughout this walkthrough, we demonstrate how to extract actionable intelligence from system logs to uncover the attack timeline, tactics, and techniques. This lab provides a comprehensive understanding of common attack vectors, detection strategies, and the importance of robust monitoring and forensic analysis in mitigating advanced threats.