Before we begin, let's define what backdooring really is. In the context of this chapter, it means almost exactly what it sounds like in that we are opening up a backdoor into an environment so that if the frontdoor is closed, we can still get in. In AWS, the backdoor could be any number of things that are covered throughout this chapter, and the frontdoor would be our primary means of access to the environment (that is, compromised IAM user credentials). We want our backdoors to outlast a situation where our compromise is detected by a defender and the compromised user is shut down, because we can still hopefully enter through the backdoor in that case.
As we have demonstrated and used repeatedly in previous chapters, IAM users can be set up with an access key ID and a secret access key that allows them access to the AWS APIs. Best practice is to generally...