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

Live forensic analysis and threat hunting

Digital forensic investigators operate on the principle that malware must always run on memory; there is nowhere they can hide. However, in recent times, technology has evolved to make memory massive and less volatile, giving rise to fileless malware – that is, malware that does not touch the disk – which maintains this hidden nature until execution time. The following sections will cover some of the tools that modern corporate investigators utilize to identify malware and conduct threat hunting, helping you understand common persistence mechanisms that malware uses.

EDR-based threat hunting

Advancements in computational technologies, cloud infrastructure, and support for massive disk and memory sizes have made it necessary for a new set of tools that can continuously monitor a host and collect live telemetry data on disk and memory, capture every footprint of an application, spot malware, and stop the attack before it can...