Playbook for DDOS Security Response

(Author : Chandra Prakash Suryawanshi, SVP- India & APAC at Aujas Networks Pvt. Ltd. )

Information security incident management if often a combination of technical controls, processes, communication strategy, detailed procedure and plan. The objective of this blog is to look at modern techniques for effective incident detection, modelling of common security threats and preparation of a response to better validate, contain and respond to an information security incident.

We will see how an effective detection strategy leveraging an SIEM solution works, coupled by effective proactive methods to perform threat hunting, followed by a response procedures.

A security event is any observable occurrence in a system or network. Events include increase in encrypted communication, port and protocol mismatch, large https packet size, increase in file share, and a firewall blocking connection attempts with correlation to other system events. Adverse events are events with a negative consequence, such as system crashes, network packet floods, unauthorized use of system privileges, unauthorized access to sensitive data, and execution of malicious code that destroys data etc. All the information is generally available in logs from systems, applications, network devices and DBs, but the key is to craft appropriate detection rules, build use cases, reduce false positives, effective analysis and technology capability to provide historical data and analytics. We will first see how an effective detection technologies can be leveraged to identify attack and patterns with SIEM and allied technologies to help.

Let's talk about Threat Hunting. Threat hunting is a proactive way of looking for threats, using internal or external threat intelligence, information mining, reverse malware analysis or by running hypothesis based on risk.

As threat hunting is a data-driven process, it’s critical to collect large amounts of data for analysis. Logs from each of the three major security data domains (network, endpoint, and application) along with authentication logs for operating systems and applications are a good place to start, followed by network transactions, such as HTTP server and proxy logs and net flow records.

Any information security incident where perpetrators are known and/or their motives and objectives are clearly visible can be termed as an attack and once detected we need to craft an effective response procedure.

We will be seeing two critical information security response procedure, one will be DDOS, followed by an APT attack in line with the NIST process and framework

The information security incident response process has three main phases – detection and analysis, response and recovery, and post incident activities. Corresponding sub-stages with brief overview are shown below.