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

Finding Azure credentials

Outside of finding vulnerabilities in an Azure application, or service, the most common option for gaining access to an Azure subscription is through guessed, stolen, or "found" credentials.

Guessing Azure AD credentials

From practical testing experience, the most common way to get into an Azure tenant is through weak or default credentials. While we have made massive technological advances over the years, users still like to use simple passwords, and administrators sometimes forget to implement identity security best practices.

There are three steps to a successful password guessing attack:

  1. Obtain a username list.
  2. Obtain a password list.
  3. Decide and execute the guessing strategy.

Let's take a look.

Obtaining a username list

Many organizations have a formal naming convention for usernames/email addresses. Some examples include <firstname>.<lastname>@company.com and <firstname>.<lastname_initial...