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

S3 access logs

Amazon S3 is a very popular cloud storage service that is highly scalable and dependable for data storage and retrieval. S3 provides high availability (HA), storage performance, and accessibility of any amount of data from around the world.

In AWS, S3 operates on buckets, which contain objects. Objects are any files, documents, images, and videos. Each object is identified using a unique identifier known as the key that serves within a bucket. A bucket can be visualized as a folder that contains all the objects.

Logging options

Access logs record information about the requests made to an Amazon S3 bucket, including details such as request information, specific resource requests, and the time and date of the request. Amazon S3 uses a specific internal account to write server access logs, which requires AWS account owners to configure explicit permission within their IAM modules to allow S3 to log server access requests.

Note

Note that S3 access logs are...