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

Summary

To summarize, AWS offers integration of API logs and generic event logs and provides a SPOG to determine threat actor activity or an insider threat within an AWS account. With CloudWatch and CloudTrail, DFIR teams can natively investigate AWS using AWS’s tools and identify activities an unauthorized user performs at a granular level. Furthermore, resources such as EC2 and S3 offer additional information concerning the configuration that allows DFIR teams to deduce and obtain further information for investigations. Remember that some security solutions, such as VPC flow logs, are not enabled by default and require the account owner or administrator to allow them explicitly. Integrating CloudTrail logs with CloudWatch and enabling Amazon GuardDuty offers DFIR teams a deep insight into threats within an AWS account and resources without explicitly going through deployments of security tools. Enabling GuardDuty and, subsequently, Amazon Detective allows telemetric information...