Book Image

Penetration Testing Azure for Ethical Hackers

By : David Okeyode, Karl Fosaaen
Book Image

Penetration Testing Azure for Ethical Hackers

By: David Okeyode, Karl Fosaaen

Overview of this book

“If you’re looking for this book, you need it.” — 5* Amazon Review Curious about how safe Azure really is? Put your knowledge to work with this practical guide to penetration testing. This book offers a no-faff, hands-on approach to exploring Azure penetration testing methodologies, which will get up and running in no time with the help of real-world examples, scripts, and ready-to-use source code. As you learn about the Microsoft Azure platform and understand how hackers can attack resources hosted in the Azure cloud, you'll find out how to protect your environment by identifying vulnerabilities, along with extending your pentesting tools and capabilities. First, you’ll be taken through the prerequisites for pentesting Azure and shown how to set up a pentesting lab. You'll then simulate attacks on Azure assets such as web applications and virtual machines from anonymous and authenticated perspectives. In the later chapters, you'll learn about the opportunities for privilege escalation in Azure tenants and ways in which an attacker can create persistent access to an environment. By the end of this book, you'll be able to leverage your ethical hacking skills to identify and implement different tools and techniques to perform successful penetration tests on your own Azure infrastructure.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
1
Section 1: Understanding the Azure Platform and Architecture
5
Section 2: Authenticated Access to Azure

Persisting in an Azure AD tenant

As the core of any Azure environment, the Azure AD tenant is a great target for persistence. Once we have escalated rights within the tenant, we have several options for creating (or modifying existing) security principles that can be used to persist in the environment. In general, creating new principals in an Azure AD tenant may create more alerts than modifying existing resources, but your mileage may vary there.

As a general path for persistence, we will need to gain access to an identity, ensure that the identity has the necessary permissions, and (if needed) create policy exceptions to allow continued access to the identity.

Creating a backdoor identity

While we have covered several ways to gain access to an existing account (managed identities, clear text credentials, and more), we have not covered how to create new identities within Azure AD. Recalling back to Chapter 1, Azure Platform and Architecture Overview, we know that an identity...