Forensic triage collections
One of the biggest pain points incident responders will face is data acquisition at the individual host level, especially when it pertains to operating system artifacts. CSPs such as Azure, AWS, and GCP offer various logging mechanisms to aid in monitoring and auditing actions on their resources. However, these logs often capture activities related to the infrastructure or services utilized. By default, they do not capture the granular details of user activities or system operations at the operating system level (except for cloud ecosystem-connected EDR agents such as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint). Even in a cyber incident that involves cloud resources, the reality is that most of an incident’s indicators of compromise (IoCs) will come from host-level artifacts.
As we have seen throughout this book, cloud log sources primarily focus on the cloud resources’ interactions. This means detailed host-level activities, such as specific Windows...
