The step in the incident handling and response process that focuses on limiting the scope and extent of an incident is  Containment . This phase aims to isolate affected systems to prevent the spread of the incident and to minimize its impact. Containment strategies may involve disconnecting affected systems from the network, blocking malicious traffic, or taking systems offline.  The goal is to contain the incident quickly to reduce damage and to maintain business operations 1 .

In the threat intelligence life cycle, the stage of  Processing and Exploitation  involves the formatting and structuring of raw data. This is the phase where collected data is turned into a format that can be more easily analyzed and used. Banter, as a threat analyst, is engaged in this specific activity, which indicates that he is in the Processing and Exploitation stage. This stage is crucial as it prepares the data for further analysis and production of actionable intelligence.

When a SOC team, like the one Ray is part of, provides additional bandwidth to network devices and increases the capacity of servers in response to a DoS/DDoS attack, they are implementing a strategy known as ‘absorbing the attack’. This approach involves scaling up resources to handle the increased load without disrupting normal services. Here’s how it works:

Increase Bandwidth:  By increasing the bandwidth, the network can handle more traffic, which is essential when under a DoS/DDoS attack, as these attacks often flood the network with excessive traffic to overwhelm it.

Enhance Server Capacity:  Similarly, increasing server capacity allows the servers to handle more requests simultaneously. This is crucial during an attack to maintain service availability.

Maintain Service Availability:  The goal of this strategy is to keep services running and available to legitimate users, even when under attack.

Monitor and Analyze:  While absorbing the attack, it’s important to monitor network traffic and analyze the attack patterns, which can help in future prevention and mitigation strategies.

 The regex pattern  /(\.|(%|%25)2E)(\.|(%|%25)2E)(\/|(%|%25)2F|\\|(%|%25)5C)/i  is indicative of a Directory Traversal Attack. This type of attack exploits insufficient security controls to gain unauthorized access to files and directories that are stored outside the web root folder. Here’s a breakdown of the regex pattern:

(\.|(%|%25)2E)  matches a period  .  or its URL-encoded forms  %2E  or  %252E . In file systems, a period can represent the current directory or, when used as  .. , the parent directory.

(\/|(%|%25)2F|\\|(%|%25)5C)  matches a forward slash  / , its URL-encoded form  %2F  or  %252F , or a backslash  \ , which is  %5C  in URL encoding. These characters are used in file paths to navigate directories.

When combined, this pattern can match sequences like  ../  or  ..%2F , which are commonly used in directory traversal attempts to navigate up the directory tree and access files outside of the intended directory.