GIAC Certified Incident Handler Certification (GCIH)

I. Overview:

In today's evolving threat landscape, breaches are inevitable. What's crucial is how fast and effectively you can detect and respond to these attacks. Staying out of breach headlines hinges on your ability to complete comprehensive incident response actions to neutralize threats.

SEC504™ training prepares you to apply dynamic and effective incident response strategies. You'll identify indicators of compromise (IoCs) and respond to breaches affecting Windows, Linux, and cloud platforms-skills you can immediately apply to protect your organization from real-world threats.

A big focus in SEC504™ training is applying what you learn: 50% of the course is hands-on where you will attack, defend, and assess the damage done by threat actors. You'll reproduce real-world breaches on complex network environments, applications, and host platforms, then assess the damage caused by threat actors. In SEC504™ training you have unlimited access to our immersive labs, allowing you to repeat exercises as often as needed. Each lab includes in-depth walkthrough videos designed to support your learning.

To truly defend your organization, you need to think like an attacker. In SEC504™ training's immersive labs, you'll use the same tools and techniques adversaries rely on, learning to recognize the artifacts they leave behind. By adopting their mindset and studying their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), you'll gain valuable insights to develop your Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) and strengthen your defenses. You will develop actionable skills that will immediately enhance your organization's security posture, making your investment in training pay off from day one.

II. Duration: 40 hours (5 days)

III. Objectives:

At the completion of SEC504™ training you will be able to:

Effectively respond to an incident in your organization in order to limit damage
Evaluate the evidence in a breach in order to identify the extent of the compromise
Identify shadow cloud systems and other threats that can expose your organization
Use attack tools against cloud and on-premises systems to assess your exposure
Apply effective defenses that significantly improve security and stop attacks
Test security defense tools to evaluate their effectiveness
Develop threat intelligence by assessing attacker tools and techniques.

IV. Intended Audience:

Incident handlers
Leaders of incident response teams
System administrators who are on the front lines defending their systems and responding to attacks
Other security personnel who are first responders when systems come under attack
General security practitioners and security architects who want to design, build, and operate their systems to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks.

V. Course outlines:

1. Incident Response and Cyber Investigations

The first section of SEC504™ training focuses on how to develop and build an incident response process in your organization. You'll learn how to apply the Dynamic Approach to Incident Response (DAIR) process to effectively verify, scope, contain, assess, and remediate threats. We'll apply this process in-depth with hands-on labs and examples from real-world compromises using PowerShell and other valuable analysis tools. You'll also learn how you can accelerate the incident analysis process without sacrificing accuracy using generative AI platforms.

Exercises

Live Windows investigation with PowerShell
Network investigation
Memory investigation
Malware investigation
Lightning Lab: WordPress Log Assessment
Lightning Lab: Tcpdump Introduction
Lightning Lab: Malware Strings

Topics

Incident Response
- Case study: Argous Corporation compromise
- Dynamic Approach to Incident Response
- Investigative analysis: Examining incident evidence
- Leveraging multiple evidence sources for incident analysis
Live Investigation
- Using PowerShell for Windows threat hunting
- Identifying suspicious Windows processes
- Correlating network and persistence activity
- Assessing file-less malware threats
- Enumerating Windows auto-start extensibility points
- Leveraging Sysinternals for live Windows examinations
Network Investigation
- Identifying compromised host beaconing with proxy server logs
- Filtering network activity to identify indicators of compromise
- Assessing encrypted network traffic with multiple data sources
- Building the incident timeline
Memory Investigation
- Collecting volatile memory from a compromised host
- Conducting offline analysis of attacker persistence
- Using Volatility 3 to investigate malware
- Build attacker event timelines using non-volatile memory captures
Malware Investigation
- Assessing attacker malware in a safe test environment
- Using snapshot and continuous recording tools
- Inspecting malware actions with RegShot and Procmon
- Identifying malicious code on Windows
Accelerating IR with Generative AI
- Summarizing malicious code artifacts for reporting
- Essential prompt engineering tips
- Automating data deobfuscation with AI
- Generating scripts to accelerate data collection and analysis
- Tips for AI training for superior prompt results
- Recognizing and mitigating the risks of AI-assisted incident response
Bootcamp: Linux Olympics
- Learn Linux using an interactive learning environment
- Build command line skills at your own pace
- Working with Linux file systems and permissions
- Using JQ to parse and filter JSON data
- Using file parsing tools, including grep, cut, and awk
- Linux compromise incident response walkthrough
Bootcamp: PowerShell Olympics
- Learn PowerShell on Windows using an interactive learning environment
- Build command line skills at your own pace
- Get started with PowerShell skills: cmdlets, functions, built-ins, and more!
- Learn to quickly interrogate a Windows system for effective threat hunting
- Accelerate your common analysis tasks with PowerShell automation

2. Scanning and Enumeration Attacks

In this course section we'll look at the techniques attackers use to conduct reconnaissance as a pre-attack step, including how they use open-source intelligence, network scanning, and target enumeration to find attack opportunities. You'll use attacker techniques to assess the security of target networks, evaluating popular protocols and endpoints for Windows, Linux, Azure, and AWS targets. After delivering the attacks, you'll investigate the logging data and evidence that remains to recognize these attacks as they happen.

Exercises

Host Discovery and Assessment with Nmap
Shadow Cloud Asset Discovery with Masscan
Windows Server Message Block (SMB) Security Investigation
Windows Password Spray Attack Detection
The Many Uses of Netcat
Lightning Lab: Nmap Port Ranges
Lightning Lab: Scanning with SMBeagle
Lightning Lab: SMB Client Access
Lightning Lab: Netcat Client Features

Topics

MITRE ATT&CK Framework Introduction
- Using ATT&CK to guide an incident response investigation
- Staying current with changing attack techniques
- Leveraging ATT&CK for threat intelligence
Network and Host Scanning with Nmap
- Host enumeration and discovery with Nmap
- Internal and external network mapping and visualization
- Minimizing network activity to avoid detection
- Deep host assessment with Nmap Scripting Engine tools
Cloud Spotlight: Cloud Scanning
- Accelerating scans with Masscan
- Walkthrough: Scanning Amazon Web Services for target discovery
- Attributing cloud hosts to a target organization
- Visualizing targets with EyeWitness
Server Message Block (SMB) Security
- Understanding Windows SMB: Essential skill development
- Identifying SMB attacks against Windows
- Using built-in tools for SMB password attacks
- Understanding SMB security features
- Exploiting SMB vulnerabilities like an attacker
Defense Spotlight: Hayabusa and Sigma Rules
- Identifying attacks using Windows Event Logs and Hayabusa
- Threat hunting using Sigma rules
- Differentiating attacks from false positives
- Remote host assessment for compromise identification
- Tips for fast assessment to begin incident analysis
Multi-purpose Netcat
- Data exfiltration while evading monitoring controls
- Internal network pivoting and lateral movement
- Implementing listener and reverse TCP backdoors on Linux and Windows
- Detailed look at attacker post-compromise techniques
- Living Off the Land (LOL) attacks to evade endpoint detection tools

3. Password Attacks and Exploit Frameworks

Attackers tirelessly deploy password attacks and exploits to infiltrate systems, posing a constant threat to your organization's systems. In this section, we explore multiple techniques for password compromises against on-premises and cloud systems. We'll leverage popular attacks tools including Legba for multi-protocol password attacks and Hashcat for cracking. We'll also dive into exploits frameworks like Metasploit for initial and post-compromise exploitation. We use the insight we can gain from these tools to better implement practical defenses and to inform our incident response playbooks.

Exercises

Using Legba for Password Guessing and Spray Attacks
Bypassing Microsoft 365 authentication defenses with Amazon AWS
Password Cracking with Hashcat
Metasploit Attack and Analysis
Client-side Exploitation with the Browser Exploitation Framework (BeEF)
Lightning Lab: Password List Filtering
Lightning Lab: Hashcat Hash Types
Lightning Lab: Using Hashcat Rules
Lightning Lab: Metasploit Searching
Lightning Lab: MsfVenom Payloads

Topics

Password Attacks
- Password attack trifecta: Guessing, spray, and credential stuffing
- Accelerating password attacks with Legba
- Techniques for bypassing password attack defenses
- Understanding real-world authentication attacks
Microsoft 365 Attacks
- Enumerating valid Microsoft 365 user accounts
- Assessing and bypassing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
- Attacking cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms
- Leveraging AWS services to bypass account lockout
- Differentiating Azure Gov Cloud and enterprise cloud security
- Investigating business email compromise
Understanding Password Hashes
- Weaknesses in Windows password hash formats
- Collecting password hashes in Windows, Linux, and cloud targets
- Mitigating GPU-based password cracking with Yescrypt and Argon2
Password Cracking
- Recovering passwords from hashes with Hashcat
- Accelerating password cracking with GPUs and cloud assets
- Effective cracking with password policy masks
- Multi-factor authentication and password cracking implications
Metasploit Framework
- Using Metasploit to identify, configure, and deliver exploits
- Selecting payloads that grant access while evading defenses
- Establishing and using Command & Control (C2) victim access
- Identifying Metasploit and Meterpreter artifacts for incident response
Drive-By Attacks
- Phishing and malicious Microsoft Office files
- Leveraging a watering hole to attack victim web browsers
- Case study: Control system attack through watering hole forum compromise
- Building extensible payloads for effective attacks
- Customizing exploits for defense bypass

4. Web Application Attacks

In this section, we analyze high-profile web application breaches, like the Dell customer portal attack, to understand the web application attacks that lead to massive data exposures. You will learn how attackers exploit flaws like forced browsing, insecure direct object references (IDOR), and command injection to access sensitive data. In the hands-on labs you will apply these attacks, equipping you with practical skills to detect and defend against them. From SQL injection to cross-site scripting, this module prepares you to secure your web applications against the tactics used in real-world breaches.

Exercises

Forced Browsing and Insecure Direct Object Resource (IDOR) Attack
Command Injection Attack
Cross-Site Scripting Attack
SQL Injection Attack
Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) and Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) Attack
Cloud Bucket Discovery and Data Harvesting
Lightning Lab: Forced Browsing with Ffuf
Lightning Lab: Command Stacking

Topics

Forced Browsing and IDOR
- Public website attack chain assessment
- Leveraging AI for identifying IDOR vulnerability patterns
- Beyond crawling: accelerating discovery with attacker endpoint lists
Command Injection
- Compromising websites with command injection
- Walkthrough: Falsimentis community service website attack
- Applying command injection in non-website targets
- Attack access enumeration through command injection
- Auditing web applications for command injection flaws
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
- Exploiting victim browsers through server flaws
- Classifying XSS types for opportunistic or target attacks
- Cookie theft, password harvesting, and camera/microphone capture attacks
- Using content security policies (CSP) to stop XSS
SQL Injection
- Understanding SQL constructs and developer errors
- Extracting data through SQL injection
- Using Sqlmap to automate vulnerability discovery
- SQL injection against cloud databases: Relational Database Service (RDS), Spanner, Azure SQL
Cloud Spotlight: SSRF and IMDS Attacks
- Identifying server-side request forgery vulnerabilities
- Understanding common requests vs. server-side requests
- Walkthrough: Falsimentis federated SSO attack
- Obtaining cloud keys through IMDS attacks
Cloud Spotlight: Insecure Storage
- Case study: Cloud bucket storage exposure
- Understanding cloud storage for Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Compute
- Discovering insecure bucket storage
- Walkthrough: Insecure storage to website persistence compromise
- Identifying insecure cloud storage access

5. Evasion and Post-Exploitation Attacks

Building on password, public-facing, and drive-by attacks, we'll dive into post-exploitation tactics where attackers bypass endpoint protection and use their foothold to access internal networks. You'll learn how privileged insider attacks work, how attackers establish persistence, and how they scan for and exfiltrate sensitive data. We'll also assess the security of vulnerable cloud deployments using automated tools and visualization techniques. You'll use these analysis skills to recognize and respond to these advanced threats, preparing you to apply what you've learned in real-world scenarios. Finally, we'll look at the steps to take after the course is over, turning what you've learned into long-term skills and helping you prepare for the certification exam.

Exercises

Endpoint Protection Bypass: Bypassing Application Allow Lists
Pivoting and Lateral Movement with Command & Control Frameworks
Exploiting Windows as A Network Insider with Responder
Establishing Persistence with Metasploit
Network Threat Hunting with Real Intelligence Threat Analytics (RITA)
Cloud Configuration Assessment with ScoutSuite
Building Review Cards with Anki
Lightning Lab: Linux Privilege Escalation with Sudo
Lightning Lab: Generating Zeek Logs

Topics

Endpoint Security Bypass
- Understanding the three techniques for endpoint bypass
- Evading application safelist controls
- Using signed executables to evade endpoint controls
- Using Microsoft-signed tools to attack systems: Living Off the Land (LOL)
- Getting the most value from Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR/XDR) platforms
Pivoting and Lateral Movement
- Using Metasploit features for lateral movement
- Attacker detection evasion through pivoting
- Using Linux and Windows features for advanced exploitation
- Command & Control (C2) for privileged internal access
Hijacking Attacks
- Exploiting privileged LAN access
- Attacking default Windows vulnerable protocols
- Password harvesting on the LAN
Establishing Persistence
- Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Event Subscription persistence techniques
- Exploiting Windows Active Directory: Golden Ticket attacks
- Web shell access and multi-platform persistence
- Cloud keys and backdoor accounts in Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Compute
Defense Spotlight: Real Intelligence Threat Analytics
- Threat hunting through network analysis
- Identifying beacons and C2 on your network
- Characterizing network oddities: Long connections
- Catching DNS exfiltration and access attacks
Cloud Spotlight: Cloud Post-Exploitation
- Privilege enumeration and escalation in cloud environments
- Identifying stealthy backdoors in Azure
- Using Pacu as a cloud attack framework
- Case study: Access to database dumping in Google Compute
- Built-in tools for data access: Microsoft 365 Compliance Search
- Assessing your cloud deployment for vulnerabilities
Where to Go from Here
- Tips for developing long-term recall and memory retention
- Applying spaced repetition theory using Anki
- Staying motivated and finding time for skill development
- Recommendations for passing your certification exam

6. Capture-the-Flag Event

Our Capture-the-Flag event is a full day of hands-on activity that has you working as a consultant for ISS Playlist, a fictitious company that has recently been compromised. You will apply all the skills you've learned in class, using the same techniques used by attackers to compromise modern, sophisticated network environments. You will work on a team or independently to scan, exploit, and complete post-exploitation tasks against a cyber range of target systems including Windows, Linux, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and cloud targets. This hands-on challenge is designed to help you practice your skills and reinforce the concepts learned throughout the course. With an integrated hint system to give you the on-demand guidance you need to succeed, the event guides you through the steps to successfully compromise target systems, bypass endpoint protection platforms, pivot to internal network high-value hosts, and exfiltrate company data.

Topics