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

Understanding Contributor IaaS escalation goals

As a Contributor, we want to eventually escalate our privileges up to the Owner role on the subscription, and/or a privileged role in the Azure AD tenant. With this role, we now have significantly more options than a Reader for attempting to escalate our privileges in the environment. As part of this, we will want to use our permissions on IaaS resources to potentially gather higher-privileged credentials from those resources. Since we have control over almost every aspect of the IaaS resources, we can now start diving deeper into those resources.

Important note

While the scenarios outlined in this chapter assume that you have Contributor access on an IaaS resource, that may not always be the case during an Azure pentest. You may be in a situation where you have local or domain credentials that allow you to execute commands on a VM, but no actual access to a subscription. The techniques that we will outline in this chapter can easily...