Book Image

Cloud Forensics Demystified

By : Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Mansoor Haqanee
Book Image

Cloud Forensics Demystified

By: Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Mansoor Haqanee

Overview of this book

As organizations embrace cloud-centric environments, it becomes imperative for security professionals to master the skills of effective cloud investigation. Cloud Forensics Demystified addresses this pressing need, explaining how to use cloud-native tools and logs together with traditional digital forensic techniques for a thorough cloud investigation. The book begins by giving you an overview of cloud services, followed by a detailed exploration of the tools and techniques used to investigate popular cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Progressing through the chapters, you’ll learn how to investigate Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and containerized environments such as Kubernetes. Throughout, the chapters emphasize the significance of the cloud, explaining which tools and logs need to be enabled for investigative purposes and demonstrating how to integrate them with traditional digital forensic tools and techniques to respond to cloud security incidents. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to handle security breaches in cloud-based environments and have a comprehensive understanding of the essential cloud-based logs vital to your investigations. This knowledge will enable you to swiftly acquire and scrutinize artifacts of interest in cloud security incidents.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Cloud Fundamentals
6
Part 2: Forensic Readiness: Tools, Techniques, and Preparation for Cloud Forensics
10
Part 3: Cloud Forensic Analysis – Responding to an Incident in the Cloud

Tools and techniques for digital forensic investigations

One of the challenges in any incident investigation is acquiring artifacts quickly and in a forensically sound manner. In some cases, investigators may collect artifacts to investigate the incident further and identify the root cause. Moving swiftly to collect artifacts and evidence is crucial to investigations. This section will explore some valuable host and memory artifacts for investigations.

Prerequisites

Before investigators can begin collecting their logs from the cloud console, we can utilize some of the prerequisites that were explored in previous chapters (enabling logs, audit trails, and so on), along with the ones listed here. These prerequisites will help investigators conduct their incident response activities much more smoothly:

  • Instance protection: Some CSPs will allow instance protection once an incident is declared. For example, in AWS, you can configure your instance to prevent it from termination...