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

AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail records activities performed on the management console of AWS accessing any AWS resource—for example, an EC2 instance created or terminated, changes to the VPC settings, and so on. Any activity on the management console of AWS is recorded as an event within CloudTrail.

CloudTrail consolidates detailed action log events in a centralized location and provides a comprehensive and unified view of account’s activity, making it easier to search, analyze, download, and respond to account activity across your AWS infrastructure. It also identifies what actions were performed by which user and any other details that help DFIR teams analyze and respond to an incident in AWS.

CloudTrail logs can be integrated into CloudWatch to query activities and perform further analysis. We will discuss CloudWatch in the next section.

The following screenshot demonstrates an example of a CloudWatch dashboard:

Figure 4.8 – CloudWatch dashboard

Figure 4.8 –...