Investigating a compromised system in a hybrid cloud

For this hybrid scenario, the compromised system will be located on-premises and the company has a cloud-based monitoring system, which for the purpose of this example will be Microsoft Defender for Cloud. For this scenario, the SecOps team is consuming the alerts generated by Microsoft Defender for Cloud and they received the following alert:

Figure 14.8: Suspicious PowerShell script alert

This is a brief description of the alert, and once the SecOps analyst expands this alert, they will see all the details, which includes information about the suspicious PowerShell command as shown in Figure 14.9:

Figure 14.9: Details about the alert

If you look closely at the suspicious command line, you will see that this is a PowerShell base64 encoded string, which is a technique documented at MITRE ATT&CK T1059.001 (attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1059/001). Although this is considered a valid and benign command...