ECS Forensics and Incident Response

Forensic Labs
2 min readAug 21, 2023

Continuing our series on Cloud Forensics and Incident Response — our latest video covers AWS ECS:

What is ECS?

How does GuardDuty work with ECS?

Container Investigation Data Sources in AWS

EKS Audit / Control Plane Logs

  • Shows: API Level Calls
  • Usefulness: Medium
  • Collected by: S3

CloudTrail Logs

  • Shows: API Level Calls
  • Usefulness: Low
  • Collected by: S3

Docker Container Filesystems

  • Normally overlay2 versioned filesystem
  • Contains all the files from all the containers
  • Usefulness: High
  • Collected by: EC2 EBS (API) or Cado Host (SSM/SSH)

Docker Logs

  • Logs what containers were started, stopped
  • Usefulness: Medium
  • Collected by: EC2 Import or Cado Host

Container Filesystems

  • Live filesystem as seen by the container, Memory
  • Contains all the files from all the containers
  • Usefulness: Very High
  • Collected by: Cado Host (ECS Exec/kubectl exec)

How do you Acquire an Amazon ECS System in Cado?

How do you Investigate an ECS Container in Cado?

Requires enableExecuteCommand

https://docs.cadosecurity.com/cado-response/discovery-import/import/aws/aws-ecs

How do you Remediate a compromised ECS Cluster?

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/guardduty/latest/ug/guardduty_remediate.html#compromised-ecs

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