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

Packet Mirroring

GCP’s Packet Mirroring feature allows security teams to collect network packets from VMs and identify security threats or activities associated with the VMs. GCP’s Packet Mirroring only mirrors traffic between VMs and external interfaces and does not mirror traffic between cluster nodes such as GKE. We will learn more about containers, including Docker and Kubernetes, in Chapter 11.

To mirror packets, ensure the principals are attached with the compute.packetMirrorUser and compute.packetMirroringAdmin roles.

An internal load balancer must be deployed with network passthrough capabilities that pass the traffic to the collector instances to enable packet mirroring. The load balancer must be pointed to a managed instance group in the backend with pre-configured instance templates, allowing GCP to create collector instances automatically. The collector instance can be a VM with tools for capturing and receiving network packets via the internal load...