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

VPC flow logs

We briefly introduced VPC in Chapter 3. VPC is the core of the network configuration for every instance within AWS. Each AWS instance (Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)) is assigned a VPC and uniquely identified using a VPC ID. VPC allows users complete control of the network environment, including defining specific IP addresses (non-public routable IPs), subnets, and security groups. Users can also configure a virtual private network (VPN) through their VPC connection. In default configurations, AWS will automatically create a VPC for every new instance of EC2. Users can also connect their EC2 instance to an existing preconfigured VPC instead.

All VPCs have a VPC identifier (VPC ID). The VPC ID is the single reference point for all network-related configuration items. For each instance, if you want to configure any network properties within AWS, you must look into each VPC specifically. In the next example, for a specific EC2 instance, certain details are captured for VPC...