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 CloudWatch

AWS CloudWatch monitors your AWS resources in near real time. You can collect and monitor resource usage and key metrics in a SPOG view. CloudWatch presents every resource metric on its dashboard for quick view. However, for DFIR teams, CloudWatch can query certain logs to support an investigation.

From a security perspective, CloudWatch is a log management solution that can centrally collect and monitor logs from systems, applications, and resources. It offers log analytics on top to allow interactive searching and analysis capabilities. Similar to CloudTrail, CloudWatch offers log exports via S3 buckets. Note that logs in CloudWatch never expire and are retained indefinitely. Administrators can change the retention policy and choose between a log retention of a day or up to 10 years. Alternatively, organizations can send CloudWatch logs to an SIEM solution via an API for centralized monitoring and management of logs.

CloudWatch is a service that allows you to...