Scene: It is 8:12AM in the SOC war room. Overnight, malware alerts have spiked sharply. A major client portal is timing out for some users in Europe.
CISO: Good morning soldier! Bring me up to speed on the incident.
SOC Analyst: Again, I am not really a soldier, but at 02:41 AM last night, our intrusion detection system flagged anomalous lateral movement from an engineering workstation. By 03:05 AM, the SIEM correlated it with a surge of failed logins that look like a brute force attack. At 03:12 AM, we saw encrypt-and-rename behavior— classic ransomware.
CISO: Sorry Son, but this is war. Who do you think is behind this latest compromise? A random script kiddie? A disgruntled employee pulling a joe job? The Russians?
SOC Analyst: I have no idea, but we also had intermittent outages that resemble a small DDoS from a rented botnet. And that traffic was mostly from North Korea. But it could just be random noise to distract us.
CISO: North Korea? How did they do this? We have all the latest firewalls and virus scanners, right? Perhaps if we followed a stricter zero trust posture, these attacks would be much harder to pull off.
SOC Analyst: Yes and no. The breech was likely caused by a successful phishing attack leading to a standard social engineering hack. Most likely, if I had to guess, a tired end user clicked a fake SSO prompt. Then the bad actor bypassed the weakened push-based multi-factor authentication with “MFA fatigue” spam approvals. We really need to get some biometric authentication on those external accounts.
CISO: Absolutely, I'll get on that, ASAP. But how will we mitigate the ransomware attack? What is our action plan?
SOC Analyst: Well, I am having the Incident Response Team initiate the standard playbook response: containment, then eradication, then recovery. We’ve isolated the three main affected subnets, revoked all stale tokens, and even rotated the high-risk credentials to avoid backup leeching.
CISO: Very Impressive. Are you sure you aren't a soldier?
SOC Analyst: Well I won't lie to you, Sir, I have been known to play CounterStrike from time to time.
CISO: Yes, I thought so, and it sure shows! Tell me now, Son, have the boys seen any signs of data exfiltration that would trigger data breach notification obligations under GDPR?
SOC Analyst: No confirmed exfil yet from "The boys". NetFlow shows outbound spikes to an anonymized VPS, but packet samples look like command traffic, not bulk data. We’re preserving audit logs for forensics right now as we speak.
CISO: Good. What about preventive gaps? Should I send in the attack drones?
SOC Analyst: Attack drones? I don't think we have those, Sir.
CISO: Oh yes that would be too messy, and we need to keep this quiet. Besides this mess, how many others issues remain then?
SOC Analyst: Two issues. First, the build agent cluster missed last week’s patch management window because of a failed pipeline. That led to a piggybacking incident and some attempted trojan horse attacks. One node still has an open CVE the vendor patched yesterday; an emergency hotfix is out, but we hadn’t rolled it. Second, some shared services still violate least privilege—service accounts can see more than they need. That could leave us vulnerable to salami shaving attacks in the Accounting cluster. Or even something more serious like a self-propagating worm that could infect the entire mail system.
CISO: Understood. First things first though. The ransomware demand note? What are the details of that?
SOC Analyst: Pretty standard stuff, Sir — the attackers just dropped an HTML message into the end-users' start pages. They claim a pretty nasty zero-day exploit and threaten release. Likely bluster; their TTPs are off-the-shelf. No unique loader, just commodity malware that infected the Intranet.
CISO: Regardless, we’ll document the extortion attempt and preserve evidence. Do not engage with the actor outside the playbook.
SOC Analyst: Yes Sir. We’ll get our cybersecurity specialists to retrain everyone to watch out for anomalous login spoofing, replay attacks, and tailgating deceptions— that should prevent this sort of thing in the future.
CISO: Perfect. While you're at it— go ahead and schedule a targeted penetration test after we’re stable— focus mainly on identity abuse, OAuth consent, and workstation hardening. I also want a posture review on VPN split-tunneling and unmanaged endpoints.
SOC Analyst: Okay I think that should do it, Sir. We will attack this thing with everything we've got and won't stop until the perps have surrendered and started begging for mercy.
CISO: Jolly good,Soldier! I see a promotion in this for you if you clear this out before the end of day— but remember— don't shoot until you see the white's of their eyes! And try not to break the Geneva convention, it'll put us all in a right pickle.
SOC Analyst: Yes Sir. Right away Sir! Sometimes I regret that I have but one life to give for my company network security.
CISO: That's the spirit, Soldier! Dismissed!
Well, that was a bit much, but I suppose the crisis was averted. End of dialogue.
- Describe a time when your network or computer was attacked by malware. Who was the bad actor? Where did the attack originate from? How did you resolve the issue?
- Who was behaving more realistically, The SOC Analyst or the CISO? Was the SOC Analyst really a soldier? What did the narrator mean when she said, "Well, that was a bit much"? Do you agree with the narrator?