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

Deploying a pentest VM in Azure

Now that we have an Azure tenant to deploy resources to, we will want to set up a VM to use for testing. This VM will allow us to follow the exercises in this book and should provide a clean base for installing tools, as compared to trying to install tools on existing systems. For anyone looking to implement an Azure base image for automating their own internal team's tooling, this should also be useful for that.

Hands-on exercise: Deploying your pentest VM

We have prepared an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template in the GitHub repository of this book. The template will deploy a Windows Server 2019 VM with the following applications installed: Git for Windows, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), and Docker Desktop.

Important note

ARM templates can be a great tool for deploying resources in an Azure environment. Since this is a book focusing on attacking (versus building) Azure environments, we won't be covering ARM templates in depth...