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

Detecting and analyzing compromised containers

Most organizations operate container architectures through Kubernetes since it offers many more scalable options and flexibility. Before we dive deeper into container analysis, it is essential to understand the components of Kubernetes, as they will play a pivotal role in your investigations.

About the Kubernetes orchestration platform

The following screenshot illustrates the basic architecture of a Kubernetes cluster; in summary, as we know, Kubernetes is an orchestration framework that manages one or more nodes that run one or more containers:

Figure 11.1 – Simple Kubernetes architecture

Figure 11.1 – Simple Kubernetes architecture

For the Kubernetes cluster, you need a master node that controls and orchestrates the cluster’s operations and worker nodes that run the pods and tasks assigned by the master node. Here are some critical components of a Kubernetes cluster:

  • API server: This is the frontend of the cluster; developers...