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

An overview of cloud services

In today’s world, there are many services that are virtualized and can be made available in the cloud. The cloud offers scalability of resources and cost-effectiveness, which have been key to its success.

Generally, cloud computing is offered in the following service models:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): IaaS provides users with access to virtualized resources such as servers, operating systems, storage, and networking. With IaaS, users are also allowed to customize their infrastructure. For example, they can enable storage encryption or configure the server to access a particular segment of the cloud network. This setup is typically applied by organizations who have their corporate data in the cloud and want to safeguard it from being generally accessible on the internet. It is also a security best practice to only allow cloud resources to access specific network connections, including corporate networks. In IaaS, users can create...