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

Host-based forensics

In the context of the cloud, a host refers to a virtual or physical machine that runs user applications and serves as an endpoint for user and application activities. It can be an individual server, a virtual machine, or a container, depending on the specific cloud model being utilized. While in traditional on-premises scenarios, a host would often refer to a tangible physical server or machine, in the cloud, hosts can be ephemeral and rapidly spun up or down based on the demand and requirements.

Important note

In this chapter, we will concentrate on Windows-based systems. Linux systems will have different host-based artifacts that can be collected and analyzed.

Host-based forensics in the cloud focuses on retrieving and analyzing data from these individual hosts or endpoints, aiming to identify signs of intrusions, lateral movements, malicious code executions, and other TTPs. Given that a host is the primary point of execution for applications and often...