Conducting Cloud Incident Response
When to Use
- Cloud security posture management (CSPM) alerts on unauthorized resource changes
- CloudTrail, Azure Activity Logs, or GCP Audit Logs show suspicious API calls
- Cloud access keys or service principal credentials are suspected compromised
- Unauthorized compute instances, storage buckets, or IAM changes are detected
- A cloud-hosted application is breached and attacker activity spans cloud services
Do not use for on-premises-only incidents with no cloud component; use standard enterprise IR procedures.
Prerequisites
- Cloud-native logging enabled and centralized: AWS CloudTrail (all regions), Azure Activity/Sign-in Logs, GCP Cloud Audit Logs
- IR-specific cloud IAM roles pre-provisioned with read-only forensic access
- Isolated forensic account/subscription/project for evidence preservation
- Cloud incident response runbooks specific to each cloud provider
- Cloud-native security tools: AWS GuardDuty, Azure Defender for Cloud, GCP Security Command Center
- Network traffic logging: VPC Flow Logs (AWS/GCP), NSG Flow Logs (Azure)
Workflow
Step 1: Detect and Confirm the Cloud Incident
Identify the scope and nat…
