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

Exploiting Azure platform features with Contributor rights

With access to the Contributor role, we have a rich set of platform-level features that we can use to manage VMs in the environment. Since we are approaching these features as penetration testers, our use cases for these features may be slightly different than your average user.

Exploiting the password reset feature

The password reset feature for Azure VMs was intended to simplify the process of resetting the password of a local Azure VM user, using the VM agent that is installed on every Azure VM. However, this feature could be abused to create new local users with administrative privileges on both Windows and Linux VMs in Azure!

This feature can be used from the Azure portal (Figure 5.6) or from Azure command-line tools. Exploit tools such as Lava can also leverage this feature to reset VM passwords at scale. This feature can be utilized by a pentester to move laterally from the Azure platform to IaaS workloads...