Detecting Lateral Movement through Tracking Event Logs

Many recent cyberattacks have been confirmed in which malware infects a
host and in turn spreads to other hosts and internal servers, resulting
in the whole organization becoming compromised. In such cases, many
points need to be investigated. Accordingly, an approach for quickly and
thoroughly investigating such critical events, ascertaining the overall
picture of the damage as accurately as possible, and collecting facts
necessary for devising remedial measures is required.

While the configuration of the network that is targeted by an attack
varies depending on the organization, there are some common patterns in
the attack methods. First, an attacker that has infiltrated a network
collects information of the host it has infected using “ipconfig”,
“systeminfo”, and other tools installed on Windows by default. Then,
they examine information of other hosts connected to the network, domain
information, account information, and other information using “net” and
other tools. After choosing a host to infect next based on the examined
information, the attacker obtains the credential information of the
user using “mimikatz”, “pwdump”, or other password dump tools. Then, by
fully utilizing “net”, “at”, or other tools, the attacker infects other
hosts and collects confidential information.

For such conventional attack methods, limited set of tools are used in
many different incidents. The many points that need to be investigated
can be dealt with quickly and systematically by understanding typical
tools often used by such attackers, and what kind of and where evidence
is left.

For such use of tools, the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team
Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) extracted tools used by many attackers
by investigating recently confirmed cases of targeted attacks. Then, a
research was conducted to investigate what kind of logs were left on the
server and clients by using such tools, and what settings need to be
configured to obtain logs that contain sufficient evidential
information. This report is a summary of the results of this research.
The details of traces (event logs and forensic architecture) generated
upon execution of the tools are compiled in “Tool Analysis Result Sheet”
and published on GitHub.

Tool Analysis Result Sheet
https://jpcertcc.github.io/ToolAnalysisResultSheet/

https://jpcertcc.github.io/ToolAnalysisResultSheet/

https://github.com/JPCERTCC/ToolAnalysisResultSheet

This repository summarizes the results of
examining logs recorded in Windows upon execution of the 49 tools which are
likely to be used by the attacker that has infiltrated a network.

Tool Analysis Result Sheet is created in HTML and can be checked from the
following URL.

A report that outlines and usage of this
research is published below. When using Tool Analysis Result Sheet, we
recommend you to check the report.

We hope this document is useful in incident investigation.
Article was copied from the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center