Book Review: Blue Team Handbook: Incident Response Edition

blueTeamHandbookEarlier this year I wrote an extremely short post discussing the Red Team Field Manual (RTFM) book. I’m currently on my third copy of the book (I’ve given the first two away) and I have a copy in my backpack at all times. I recently saw some traffic on a SANS mailing list about similar book geared towards blue teamers and had to check it out.

Like the RTFM, “Blue Team Handbook: Incident Response Edition” is small, affordable and is more of a collection of steps and command examples than a traditional book meant to be read from start to finish. The Blue Team Handbook covers topics such as Windows and Linux volatile data system investigation, network traffic analysis techniques, suspicious network traffic patterns and Snort configuration and usage. Amazon now lists an updated version 2.0 of the book with 20 new pages including information on database incident response.

The book is currently listed for under $14 on amazon and is perfect to keep with the RTFM in my backpack. If having a printed collection of incident response methodology and commands is something you’d like to have the Blue Team Handbook is worth checking out. When I inevitably give my current copy away I’ll have an excuse to get the new version with the database coverage šŸ™‚

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SANS Index How To Guide with Pictures

Image
I got some great advice recently on creating an index for SANS exams and I wanted to write a blog post to share it with others. I took the SANS FOR 508 Computer Forensics course in 2008. It was way over my head but I had a great time and learned a ton. A few months ago I finally decided to go for my GCFA certification. I had four year old material from a course that had been completely revamped and no index. I passed the exam with a score in the 80s but it was a grueling experience. I had to rush on the last part of the exam and never felt comfortable. A few months after my GCFA exam I got an opportunity to attend a SANS SEC 504 class. I really wanted to prepare for my GCIH exam the right way so while I was at the conference I asked several individuals how they prepared their index. Most people told me that their indexes were 8-10 pages. A lot of these people had more SANS certs than I have friends so their methods obviously worked for them. My class had a teaching assistant (also SANS
Read more

Introducing FaviconLocator: The Eazy Button to Searching by Favicon

Image
  Favicons (short for favorite icons) are the cute little pixelated images that appear next to the site name in web browser tabs, bookmarks, etc. In the image below we can see the iconic GitHub logo on their site and the KFC logo on a bucket of chicken on their site. Originally, favicons were designed to add a touch of professionalism and branding, but for anyone who is like me and has over a dozen tabs open at any time, favicons are the only thing displayed and how I navigate tabs. Most of us rely on favicons on a daily basis but many never think of them as a tool we can use in OSINT and CTI investigations. That’s what we’re doing to talk about here as well as introduce a new tool. In addition to branding and aiding in navigation between tabs, favicons can serve as unique identifiers for websites. These unique identifiers can help us: Trace the online presence of organizations and discover obscure digital assets Map the online infrastructure of potential threats Potentially de-ano
Read more

Automating Domain Squatting Detection with DNSTwist and Python

Image
  There’s a good chance that, at some point, you’ve received a spam email with a link that looked close to the name of a popular domain but was just a little off. Payapl.com instead of Paypal.com or similar. Domain squatting is a malicious activity where attackers register domain names similar to legitimate ones. Attackers may use these domains to deceive users into believing they are visiting a legitimate website, which can lead to phishing and other attacks. DNSTwist (available here: https://github.com/elceef/dnstwist ) is a popular tool that helps identify domain names that are similar to a given domain name. It generates a list of potential domain names by applying various fuzzing techniques to the given domain name and then checks if these domains are registered. Check out the list of Bank Of America copycat domains: DNSTwist is an amazing tool that should likely be a part of every organization's Cyber Threat Intelligence monitoring efforts, and I wanted to automate it
Read more