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

Cloud Security Command Center (Cloud SCC)

Cloud SCC is like a dashboard for notifying organizations and security teams about possible threats or vulnerabilities. Cloud SCC is only available when a GCP account is set up as an organization. Individual GCP users do not have access to Cloud SCC. When an anomaly is identified, it creates a report of a particular threat or misconfiguration in GCP’s realm, called a finding. Cloud SCC provides a consolidated view of all the findings and anomalies detected within a cloud service, such as a GCE.

Note that there are two activation levels; by default, organizations, when they sign up, are assigned the Standard service tier, which has limited functionality and includes looking at the general security health of GCEs and their configurations. It also includes features such as error reporting, continuous exports to Pub/Sub, and access to other integration points, including Cloud Data Loss Prevention, Cloud Armor, and so on.

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