Cloud Forensic for GCP

Cloud Forensics for GCP is a practitioner-focused guide to investigating security incidents in Google Cloud environments. It's written for incident responders, forensic examiners, and cloud security engineers who already understand core DFIR fundamentals but have never run a structured investigation across a multi-project Google Cloud estate.

Google Cloud gives investigators extraordinarily rich telemetry, but only if the right logs were enabled before the incident happened. This book bridges that gap. It covers the resource hierarchy, the Cloud Audit Logs pipeline, identity and access abuse patterns, Compute Engine and GKE acquisition techniques, container and serverless forensics, Cloud Storage exfiltration analysis, evidence handling at scale, and BigQuery-based timeline construction. Every chapter pairs conceptual explanation with runnable gcloud examples, BigQuery SQL queries, and reusable artifacts (acquisition checklists, log-source-to-question tables, isolation runbooks) that you can adapt directly into your team's playbook.

The book closes with three end-to-end walkthroughs, a leaked key leading to cryptomining, a metadata server SSRF, and cloud-native ransomware, each traced from first detection to final findings report, followed by a chapter on building a lasting GCP forensic readiness program.

Whether you're building a greenfield Google Cloud investigation capability or extending an existing DFIR program into the cloud, this book gives you the mental models and concrete techniques to pursue adversaries across projects, services, and ephemeral infrastructure.