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

Cloud Evidence Acquisition

Until now, we have looked at investigating artifacts locally within the cloud using the tools provided by the Cloud Service Provider (CSP). We looked at AWS GuardDuty CloudTrail from a logging and investigation point of view. We also looked at GCP’s Cloud Logging capability to investigate cloud logs emitted by various services, and Azure Monitor offers similar capabilities for services hosted within Microsoft Azure.

This chapter will take a step further in our cloud investigative journey and look at methods and techniques for securely collecting artifacts or forensic images of core services for offline analysis. Investigators will recognize that not all investigations can be performed using native cloud tools. Investigators may be required to use specialized tools that they have access to in a forensic environment, and the challenge will be to collect images from the cloud in a forensically sound and legally acceptable manner. We will explore these...