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 acquisition of Microsoft Azure Instances

Like AWS, Microsoft Azure offers a similar approach when collecting the full disk image of an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) instance. You will have to specifically create a snapshot and then look to export the snapshot. Let us look at these specific steps in detail.

Step 1 – creating an Azure VM Snapshot

As indicated earlier, each cloud platform will have slight variations in terms of the steps to achieve an entire disk and memory imaging; familiarity with these variations will help investigators greatly to the point where they can automate basic tasks if the number of VMs for forensic acquisition is significant:

  1. The first step is ensuring investigators have information about the infected Azure VM. This includes the VM name and operating system.
  2. Investigators can create a full disk snapshot of this infected Azure VM. Investigators may prefer to turn off the VM entirely before taking the snapshot. Snapshots are...