It's really cool how different organizations gave us great ways to think about hacking and guarding
against those blackouts.
Lockheed Martin really took a military concept called the kill chain, and they were the first organization
that brought this to our world of cyber.
And this is a really great thing because what a military kill chain was all about was figuring out the
various activities of your adversaries and determining how you could stop them at various points.
This works out great for us from a cyber security perspective, because just like an attack on the traditional
battlefield, there is going to be various steps that are typically taken.
And these various steps offer abilities for us to stop these blackouts in their tracks.
So I'll be hitting you with elements of the cyber kill chain throughout this entire ultimate guide.
You are going to become an expert when it comes to everything involving reconnaissance, what's happening
here?
The attackers are figuring out the addressing and the services that we're offering.
They're figuring out what we have available so how they can attack us.
Then they enter a weaponization phase.
They start looking at their malware and their other types of techniques and tactics, and they start
figuring out how they can attack us.
So based on their reconnaissance, they start building this weaponizing information.
Once they've got the malware or the worm or however they're going to attack us.
Maybe it's ransomware.
Once they've got that figure it out, they then figure out how they are going to deliver that payload
to us.
Yikes.
Maybe they're going to make a remote access connection in order to deliver the payload.
Then, of course, they trigger the payload.
Yikes.
The exploitation phase is where they're actually triggering that malicious payload, and then the installation
phase will occur.
Oftentimes, this is where backdoors are being installed.
Or maybe the Trojan software that was buried in the weaponization and delivered code is now executed
and now they entered the command and control phase.
Really scary.
They are in the systems and they are starting to acquire perhaps the data that they are going to be
holding hostage against us.
And that wraps up the cyber kill chain because now they're actually taking the actions against us.
And if we think about the famous case of the Colonial Pipeline attack, we saw them go through the reconnaissance,
the weaponization, the delivery.
Every single one of these steps, we can point to the exact point in that attack where they were in
each of these phases.
I'll have lots of practice questions for you.
It's for you to really master these phases as well as flashcards, because this is really critical information.
And of course, what's great is if you're struggling with any of these steps, we're going to be talking
about them in depth in separate areas of this ultimate guide.
But thank you so much for joining me here in our initial look at the cyber kill chain.