When Ray Nicholson, the senior cloud security engineer, identifies that an attacker has compromised

a particular virtual machine (VM) using an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), his priority is to limit the

scope of the incident and protect other resources in the cloud environment. Turning off the

compromised VM may seem like an immediate protective action, but it has significant implications:

Shutdown Impact: When a VM is turned off, its current state and all volatile data in the RAM are lost.

This includes any data that might be crucial for forensic analysis, such as the attacker's tools and

running processes.

Forensic Data Loss: Critical evidence needed for a thorough investigation, such as memory dumps,

active network connections, and ephemeral data, will no longer be accessible.

Data Persistence: While some data is stored in the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), not all of the forensic data

can be retrieved from the disk image alone. Live analysis often provides insights that cannot be

captured from static data.

Thus, by turning off the VM, Ray risks losing essential forensic data that is necessary for a complete

investigation into the incident.

Reference:

NIST SP 800-86: Guide to Integrating Forensic Techniques into Incident Response

AWS Cloud Security Best Practices

Azure Security Documentation