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

Forensic triage collections

One of the biggest pain points incident responders will face is data acquisition at the individual host level, especially when it pertains to operating system artifacts. CSPs such as Azure, AWS, and GCP offer various logging mechanisms to aid in monitoring and auditing actions on their resources. However, these logs often capture activities related to the infrastructure or services utilized. By default, they do not capture the granular details of user activities or system operations at the operating system level (except for cloud ecosystem-connected EDR agents such as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint). Even in a cyber incident that involves cloud resources, the reality is that most of an incident’s indicators of compromise (IoCs) will come from host-level artifacts.

As we have seen throughout this book, cloud log sources primarily focus on the cloud resources’ interactions. This means detailed host-level activities, such as specific Windows...