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 GCP instances

Like the steps we saw for AWS and Microsoft Azure, forensic acquisition of a GCP compute follows the same steps. We will first take a snapshot of the compute engine instance and then attach the snapshot as a separate drive to another forensic collector compute instance so we can do a bit-by-bit copy before exporting the disk image via cloud storage or any other data transfer means.

Step 1 – creating a snapshot of the compute engine instance

So, let us look at the pre-requisite steps to acquire a forensic image of a compute instance:

  1. The first step is to create a disk snapshot of the compute engine instance; this can be done by accessing the navigation menu under Storage and selecting Snapshots. GCP offers two forms of snapshots. The first is regular snapshots, which include a complete disk snapshot of the compute engine instance, while the second is instant snapshots, which are more like an in-place backup of the disk used...