Understanding C2

The battle between cybersecurity professionals and threat actors is always a continuous race against time as to whether the threat actors are going to discover a security vulnerability on a system and exploit it before the cybersecurity professionals are able to identify the security flaw and implement countermeasures to prevent a cyber-attack. As each day goes by, cybersecurity-related news reveals how organizations are discovering their systems and networks have been compromised and how they are working on eradicating threats such as malware and recovering their systems to a working state.

However, while organizations are not always able to detect security incidents in real time and stop an attack, threat actors can live on their victims’ networks and systems for a long time. This enables threat actors to move around the network using lateral movement, escalate their user privileges with vertical movement, exfiltrate the organization’s data, install...