performing-cloud-forensics-investigation

# Performing Cloud Forensics Investigation ## When to Use - When investigating a security breach in AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud environments - For collecting volatile and non-volatile evidence from cloud infrastructure - When tracing unauthorized access through cloud service API logs - During incident response requiring preservation of cloud-based evidence - For analyzing compromised virtual machines, containers, or serverless functions ## Prerequisites - Administrative access to the cloud account under investigation - AWS CLI, Azure CLI, or gcloud CLI configured with appropriate permissions - Understanding of cloud-native logging (CloudTrail, Activity Log, Audit Log) - Forensic workstation with cloud SDKs installed - Knowledge of IAM, networking, and compute services in target cloud - Evidence preservation procedures for cloud environments ## Workflow ### Step 1: Preserve Cloud Evidence and Establish Scope ```bash # === AWS Evidence Preservation === # Snapshot compromised EC2 instance volumes INSTANCE_ID="i-0abc123def456789" VOLUME_IDS=$(aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids $INSTANCE_ID \ --query 'Reservations[].Instances[].BlockDeviceMappings[].Ebs.VolumeId' --output text) for vol in $VOLUME_IDS; do aws ec2 create-snapshot --volume-id $vol \ --description "Forensic snapshot - Case 2024-001 - $(date -u)" \ --tag-specifications "ResourceType=snapshot,Tags=[{Key=Case,Value=2024-001},{Key=Evidence,Value=true}]" done # Capture instance metadata aws ec2...