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Hands-On AWS Penetration Testing with Kali Linux

By : Karl Gilbert Gupta, Benjamin Caudill

3.7 (15)

Buy this Book

Hands-On AWS Penetration Testing with Kali Linux

3.7 (15)

By: Karl Gilbert Gupta, Benjamin Caudill

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

The cloud is taking over the IT industry. Any organization housing a large amount of data or a large infrastructure has started moving cloud-ward — and AWS rules the roost when it comes to cloud service providers, with its closest competitor having less than half of its market share. This highlights the importance of security on the cloud, especially on AWS. While a lot has been said (and written) about how cloud environments can be secured, performing external security assessments in the form of pentests on AWS is still seen as a dark art. This book aims to help pentesters as well as seasoned system administrators with a hands-on approach to pentesting the various cloud services provided by Amazon through AWS using Kali Linux. To make things easier for novice pentesters, the book focuses on building a practice lab and refining penetration testing with Kali Linux on the cloud. This is helpful not only for beginners but also for pentesters who want to set up a pentesting environment in their private cloud, using Kali Linux to perform a white-box assessment of their own cloud resources. Besides this, the book covers a large variety of AWS services that are often overlooked during a pentest — from serverless infrastructure to automated deployment pipelines. By the end of this book, you will be able to identify possible vulnerable areas efficiently and secure your AWS cloud environment.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Get in touch

Disclaimer

Free Chapter

Section 1: Kali Linux on AWS

Setting Up a Pentesting Lab on AWS

Technical requirements

Setting up a vulnerable Ubuntu instance

Setting up a vulnerable Windows instance

Configuring security groups within the lab

Summary

Further reading

Setting Up a Kali PentestBox on the Cloud

Technical requirements

Setting up Kali Linux on AWS EC2

Configuring OpenSSH for remote SSH access

Setting up Guacamole for remote access

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Exploitation on the Cloud using Kali Linux

Technical requirements

Configuring and running Nessus

Exploiting a vulnerable Linux VM

Exploiting a vulnerable Windows VM

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Section 2: Pentesting AWS Elastic Compute Cloud Configuring and Securing

Setting Up Your First EC2 Instances

Technical requirements

Setting Up Ubuntu on AWS EC2

Configuring VPC settings

Storage types that are used in EC2 instances

Configuring firewall settings

Configuring EC2 authentication

Summary

Further reading

Penetration Testing of EC2 Instances using Kali Linux

Technical requirements

Installing a vulnerable service on Windows

Scanning and reconnaissance using Nmap

Identifying and fingerprinting open ports and services using Nmap

Performing an automated vulnerability assessment using Nexpose

Using Metasploit for automated exploitation

Using Meterpreter for privilege escalation, pivoting, and persistence

Summary

Further reading

Elastic Block Stores and Snapshots - Retrieving Deleted Data

Technical requirements

Creating, attaching, and detaching new EBS volumes from EC2 instances

Extracting deleted data from EBS volumes

Full disk encryption on EBS volumes

Summary

Further reading

Section 3: Pentesting AWS Simple Storage Service Configuring and Securing

Reconnaissance - Identifying Vulnerable S3 Buckets

Setting up your first S3 bucket

S3 permissions and the access API

Creating a vulnerable S3 bucket

Summary

Further reading

Exploiting Permissive S3 Buckets for Fun and Profit

Extracting sensitive data from exposed S3 buckets

Injecting malicious code into S3 buckets

Backdooring S3 buckets for persistent access

Summary

Further reading

Section 4: AWS Identity Access Management Configuring and Securing

Identity Access Management on AWS

Creating IAM users, groups, roles, and associated privileges

Limit API actions and accessible resources with IAM policies

Using IAM access keys

Signing AWS API requests manually

Summary

Privilege Escalation of AWS Accounts Using Stolen Keys, Boto3, and Pacu

The importance of permissions enumeration

Using the boto3 library for reconnaissance

Dumping all the account information

Permission enumeration with compromised AWS keys

Privilege escalation and gathering credentials using Pacu

Summary

Using Boto3 and Pacu to Maintain AWS Persistence

Backdooring users

Backdooring role trust relationships

Backdooring EC2 Security Groups

Using Lambda functions as persistent watchdogs

Summary

Section 5: Penetration Testing on Other AWS Services

Security and Pentesting of AWS Lambda

Setting up a vulnerable Lambda function

Attacking Lambda functions with read access

Attacking Lambda functions with read and write access

Pivoting into Virtual Private Clouds

Summary

Pentesting and Securing AWS RDS

Technical requirements

Setting up a vulnerable RDS instance

Connecting an RDS instance to WordPress on EC2

Identifying and enumerating exposed RDS instances using Nmap

Exploitation and data extraction from a vulnerable RDS instance

Summary

Further reading

Targeting Other Services

Route 53

Simple Email Service (SES)

Attacking all of CloudFormation

Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

Summary

Section 6: Attacking AWS Logging and Security Services

Pentesting CloudTrail

More about CloudTrail

Setup, best practices, and auditing

Reconnaissance

Bypassing logging

Disrupting trails

Summary

GuardDuty

An introduction to GuardDuty and its findings

Alerting about and reacting to GuardDuty findings

Bypassing GuardDuty

Summary

Section 7: Leveraging AWS Pentesting Tools for Real-World Attacks

Using Scout Suite for AWS Security Auditing

Technical requirements

Setting up a vulnerable AWS infrastructure

Configuring and running Scout Suite

Parsing the results of a Scout Suite scan

Using Scout Suite's rules

Summary

Using Pacu for AWS Pentesting

Pacu history

Getting started with Pacu

Pacu commands

Creating a new module

An introduction to PacuProxy

Summary

Putting it All Together - Real - World AWS Pentesting

Pentest kickoff

Unauthenticated reconnaissance

Authenticated reconnaissance plus permissions enumeration

Privilege escalation

Persistence

Post-exploitation

Auditing for compliance and best practices

Summary

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Setting Up a Kali PentestBox on the Cloud

There is a readily available Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that runs Kali Linux on the Amazon Marketplace. This means that a penetration tester can quickly set up a Kali Linux instance on the Amazon Cloud and access it at any time for any kind of penetration test. This chapter focuses on creating an Amazon EC2 instance, setting it up with a Kali Linux AMI, and configuring remote access to this host in a variety of ways. Once set up, a penetration tester can remotely access a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) belonging to an AWS account and perform pentests within that VPC and on any remote hosts using Kali.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following: