Cloud Forensic for AWS

If you learned digital forensics on disk images and on-premise networks, AWS will quietly rearrange almost every assumption you carry. Cloud Forensics for AWS is a practitioner-oriented guide for incident responders, forensic examiners, and cloud security engineers who need to investigate compromises inside Amazon Web Services.

Across twelve chapters, this book walks you through how cloud investigations differ from traditional IR, how to build and operate a dedicated forensic account, and how to extract and preserve evidence from EC2, container, and serverless workloads. You'll learn to query CloudTrail and the broader AWS log landscape at scale with Athena and CloudTrail Lake, trace credential abuse and STS role chains, investigate S3 data exfiltration and ransomware, and handle evidence with the rigor a real chain of custody demands.

The text is dense with AWS CLI and SQL examples, runbook fragments, and worked case studies, including three end-to-end incidents (a leaked access key, an IMDS SSRF that escalates to S3 exfiltration, and a cloud-native ransomware case) that take a real GuardDuty alert from detection through to a final report. The book closes with a practical readiness program: the trails, SCPs, playbooks, and tabletop exercises that separate a clean investigation from a chaotic one.

This book assumes solid DFIR fundamentals and working familiarity with AWS core services, but no prior cloud forensics experience. By the end, you should be able to step into an unfamiliar AWS environment, receive an alert, and deliver a credible forensic report within days, not weeks.