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

VPC Flow Logs

Like AWS, VPC Flow Logs are not enabled for GCE by default. Turning on VPC Flow Logs is relatively easy and requires minimal effort. It’s important to note that VPC Flow Logs are aggregated by time in minutes and summarized in a dashboard that includes relevant information. VPC Flow Logs are enabled at the subnet level, meaning every flow log is associated with a subnet that your GCE is part of. This typically refers to GCP’s internal subnet architecture. Turning on VPC Flow Logs for a noisy server may generate many logs, ultimately impacting costs.

Enabling VPC Flow Logs

To analyze traffic, you must first enable VPC Flow Logs within GCE. As GCEs are created by default, a regional VPC acts as the network gateway for the virtual server to access the internet or other GCP resources. Alternatively, if a custom VPC node is created, you must ensure that the VPC Flow Log option is turned on for the GCE to send logs to Logs Explorer. We’ll look at...