Traditional digital forensics has a straightforward playbook for compromised machines: pull the drive, image it, analyze the image. In cloud environments that approach does not work. You cannot physically pull a disk from a data center you do not have physical access to. Downloading a full virtual disk over the internet for a 512GB drive takes hours and costs a significant amount in egress fees. And shutting down the VM disrupts the business and may destroy volatile evidence.

Network logs tell you what traffic hit a machine. Activity logs tell you when it was created and modified. But neither tells you what happened inside the operating system — which processes ran, which accounts authenticated locally, which files were accessed. For that level of detail, you need OS-level logs, and in Azure collecting those requires an agent running on the VM itself. The upside is significant: Azure's diagnostic agent lets you pull Windows event logs and Linux sy

If the previous article covered the logs you are likely to find turned on when you arrive at a scene, this one covers the logs you need but probably will not find. NSG flow logs, storage account access logs, and the forensic trails for tracking data exfiltration — all off by default. That means you either find them already configured or you turn them on immediately and accept that prior activity may be gone forever. The good news: when these logs were configured, they hold so

A complete, no-fluff technical walkthrough — from zero infrastructure to a live, multi-region phishing drill hitting larger set of employees across multiple countries. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. What Is This and Why Are We Building It? Alright, let's kick things off. What exactly is a phishing simulation drill? In plain English: it's a controlled, authorized test where your own security team se

Logs are the heartbeat of any Azure investigation. But Azure's logging architecture is not a single flat file you download and read — it is a multi-layered system where different types of activity are captured in different log sources, stored in different places, and queried in different ways. Miss a layer and you miss evidence. The Five Log Sources You Need to Know Azure organizes its logs into five categories. Understanding these upfront prevents the confusion of wondering