Unveiling the Invisible: LOTL and LOLbins Detection Techniques
Comprehensive and Detailed Logging
📌 Implementation of Comprehensive Logging: Establishing extensive and detailed logging mechanisms is crucial. This includes enabling logging for all security-related events across platforms and ensuring that logs are aggregated in a secure, centralized location to prevent tampering by adversaries.
📌 Cloud Environment Logging: For cloud environments, it's essential to enable logging for control plane operations and configure logging policies for all cloud services, even those not actively used, to detect potential unauthorized activities.
📌 Verbose Logging for Security Events: Enabling verbose logging for events such as command lines, PowerShell activities, and WMI event tracing provides deeper visibility into tool usage within the environment, aiding in the detection of malicious LOTL activities.
Establishing Behavioral Baselines
📌 Maintaining Baselines: Continuously maintaining a baseline of installed tools, software, account behavior, and network traffic allows defenders to identify deviations that may indicate malicious activity.
📌 Network Monitoring and Threat Hunting: Enhancing network monitoring, extending log storage, and deepening threat hunting tactics are vital for uncovering prolonged adversary presence leveraging LOTL techniques.
📌 Leveraging Automation: Using automation to review logs continually and compare current activities against established behavioral baselines increases the efficiency of hunting activities, especially focusing on privileged accounts and critical assets.
📌 Refining Monitoring Tools: It's important to refine monitoring tools and alerting mechanisms to differentiate between typical administrative actions and potential threat behavior, thus focusing on alerts that most likely indicate suspicious activities.
📌 User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA): Employing UEBA to analyze and correlate activities across multiple data sources helps identify potential security incidents that may be missed by traditional tools and profiles user behavior to detect insider threats or compromised accounts.
📌 Cloud Environment Architecting: Architecting cloud environments to ensure proper separation of enclaves and enabling additional logs within the environment provide more insight into potential LOTL activities.