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

Traditional forensics versus cloud forensics

Traditional and cloud forensics play critical roles in incident response but differ in focus and methodologies due to the distinct environments they address.

Here are their similarities:

  • Evidence collection: Both traditional and cloud forensics involve collecting and preserving digital evidence to reconstruct events leading to an incident. This may include collecting memory dumps, log files, network traffic, and filesystem artifacts. Investigators often use cloud storage to store large volumes of artifacts, irrespective of the underlying CSP, as most breaches affect a cloud tenant at a CSP. In scenarios where the underlying CSP is believed to be compromised, it is recommended that investigators save all the necessary artifacts in a different CSP storage or offline for analysis.
  • Analysis techniques: Both domains employ similar techniques for analyzing digital evidence, such as examining file structures, metadata, timestamps...