Amazon Detective vs Exterro FTK Forensic Toolkit: 2026 Comparison

AWS security teams investigating incidents across multi-account environments will get the most from Amazon Detective because it automatically maps attack paths through your own data instead of relying on threat intelligence overlays. The service ingests VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail, and GuardDuty findings natively, eliminating the integration tax that slows most DFIR tools. Skip this if your infrastructure lives outside AWS or you need forensics depth beyond the AWS perimeter; Detective excels at answering "how did the attacker move through our accounts" but won't help you reconstruct what happened on-premises or inside your applications.