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

Reviewing common cleartext data stores

In this section, we will review common areas within Azure that are available to the Reader role where cleartext passwords can be stored. These may be intentional cleartext passwords, but for the most part, these data stores will contain credentials that are accidentally exposed.

One important thing to note is that some credentials are meant to be in cleartext. As you will later see, there are specific services in Azure where cleartext passwords are expected and utilized as part of the service. This may seem like a dangerous practice, and it is certainly something that we will make use of as an attacker, but with proper authorization controls around the credentials, they can be safely used by some services.

It is worth mentioning that Microsoft has improved in this area by requiring read/write permissions or more explicit permissions to be able to read configurations that could store sensitive information that gives access to data. Here...