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 the Contributor RBAC role

As we mentioned briefly in the first chapter of this book, the built-in Contributor RBAC role grants full access to manage all resources at the scope of assignment (management group, subscription, or resource group), but it is restricted from assigning permissions to other users or identities.

Given this role's level of access, our focus will not only be on using the permissions but also on how to leverage them to exploit user misconfigurations, with the goals of escalating privileges and moving laterally. We will achieve this by exploiting Azure platform features that can be used to run operating system-level commands/scripts on IaaS workloads such as VMs and virtual machine scale sets (VMSSes).

Important note

For those with more experience in on-premises Windows environments, Contributor access is similar to having a domain account with a local administrator on most of the systems. You have rights to manage infrastructure and make...