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

This chapter delved into the crucial role of log analysis in incident response within the Azure environment. It emphasized the significance of understanding the available log sources in Azure, how to obtain them, and best practices for analyzing the data to effectively detect, contain, and resolve security incidents. By familiarizing incident response professionals with the tools and techniques specific to Azure, they can enhance their ability to safeguard and respond to security incidents in a cloud infrastructure context.

This chapter highlighted the importance of differentiating between default log availability and the need to enable certain logs, drawing parallels to AWS. Then, it outlined the diverse logs provided by essential Azure services and products, as previously discussed in Chapter 3, and examined their utilization for investigative purposes. In particular, this chapter explored Azure Log Analytics, Azure Virtual Network flow logs, Azure Storage, Azure Virtual...