Ransomware Attack Simulation and Drills: Key Challenges, Difficulties, and Mitigation Guide

Since the massive outbreak of WannaCry ransomware in 2017 to the recent ransomware attack on a well-known major bank, enterprises have fully realised the importance of defending against ransomware.

National and regulatory authorities have also issued various documents requiring organisations to conduct ransomware attack drills and verify the effectiveness of their defenses. In practical drill operations, organisations often face several pain points, resulting in drill and verification responses that fail to meet expectations.

▌ Pain Point: Authenticity and ROI are the Greatest Challenges

1. Conventional ransomware drills require a large amount of manual intervention and are difficult to automate and complete quickly;

2. Lack of collection of actual attack processes from various ransomware gangs makes it difficult to mimic real ransomware attack chains;

3. Lack of access to real samples, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), while ransomware gangs are constantly introducing new TTPs; the figure below shows the ATT&CK techniques adopted by LockBit3.0 to attack a major bank;

   

4. Researching and executing ransomware requires significant manpower and time, which is extremely difficult for the vast majority of enterprises, and the return on investment is disproportionate;

5. It is difficult to guarantee the safety of real systems. If real ransomware attack samples are to be executed, safety issues must be considered;

6. Conventional ransomware drills cannot verify the actual recovery effectiveness of various backups and emergency responses after an enterprise is attacked.

▌ Key Characteristics of Current Conventional Ransomware Drills

Based on the pain points of the ransomware drills mentioned above, the commonalities of most ransomware drills today can be summarised as follows:

1. Focus primarily on testing the killing capability of anti-virus software and the recovery capability of data backups;

2. Supplemented by drilling the post-incident handling capabilities of relevant personnel;

3. When drilling ransomware execution, it can only run in physically isolated machines (laptops, servers), detached from the real environment, which affects the detection capabilities of security software;

4. Most do not focus on the attack process prior to ransomware execution, nor on data leakage behaviour and methods.

▌ SecXun Verification Helps You Upgrade Your Ransomware Drills

SecXun Verification has always been validating security defense effectiveness using real, automated APT attack scenarios. It not only tracks and researches various named APT groups worldwide, but also includes the tracking and research of various ransomware gangs.

▶ Scenario Playbook: Designing Verification Scenarios Based on the Full Attack Lifecycle

The verification scenarios for each ransomware gang are designed logically based on the entire attack chain, from initial access (foothold) to data exfiltration, execution of encryption, and ransom demand.

This allows every enterprise/organisation using the SecXun Security Metrics Verification Platform to understand the true nature of ransomware attacks: dealing with ransomware requires more than just anti-virus software and backup systems; it requires the entire security defense architecture (security measures, processes, personnel, etc.) to collaborate.

▶ Real Execution: Rich Library of Real Attack Samples and Protected Sandboxes

SecXun Security Lab possesses industry-leading security research and APT group tracking capabilities, having tracked over 100 ransomware organisations and over 1,000 related attack methods, which fully meets the needs of enterprises to verify their ransomware defense effectiveness.

SecXun Verification's unique protected sandbox ensures that when users execute real attack samples, the existing environment remains completely unaffected, securing the safety of live systems.

▶ Recovery and Response: Verifying Multi-dimensional Security Levels

Although ransomware has garnered significant attention due to its wide scope of impact and heavy losses, from a macro perspective, national and regulatory requirements for organisations' security capabilities do not stop at verifying ransomware defense effectiveness. Instead, they expect organisations to enhance their response capabilities across multiple dimensions, such as the effectiveness and recoverability of backups, and personnel response to ransomware.

SecXun Verification supports running all ransomware in a real environment under special circumstances, thereby helping organisations verify their backup recovery effectiveness and the actual response capabilities of personnel.

By addressing the pain points of current ransomware drills, enterprises/organisations can truly "know their enemy" as well as "know themselves".

▌ How Does the SecXun Security Metrics Verification Platform Work?

The platform provides continuous verification of existing security products, including Firewalls, NGFW, WAF, Web and Email Security Gateways (SWG and SEG), IPS and DLP, Anti-virus, EDR, and other security products.

In addition, the platform leverages SIEM solutions to automate the presentation of matching results by verifying logging and alerting capabilities based on simulated attacks, reducing manual effort.

For detected security defense gaps, the platform provides proprietary alert signatures and detection rule names specific to security products/vendors to help teams quickly mitigate risks.

▶ The SecXun Security Metrics Verification Platform Provides You With:

• Full cyber kill chain attack simulation

• Scenario-based one-click verification or custom verification

• Easy deployment and management

• Mitigation recommendations based on specific security products/vendors

• Individually tailored attack scenarios

• Scenario classification based on frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK and Cyber Kill Chain

• Rich visual charts and graphs

• Support for SaaS and on-premise deployment

• Continuously Updated Verification Rule Library:

Includes 13,000+ attack methods, 1,600+ attack scenarios, and 300+ threat groups

Among them, 1,000+ are ransomware-related methods, covering 100+ ransomware gangs

SecXun Security Lab provides the latest and most popular threat intelligence to ensure you can verify at the earliest opportunity.

Follow our WeChat Official Account "SecXun Security Verification" and reply "Ransom" to obtain the complete "Guide to Ransomware Attack Simulation and Drills".