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

Extracting data from Azure VMs

We now have a good understanding of many of the options that we have for manipulating Azure VMs as a Contributor. With this access, we will want to start gathering sensitive information and credentials from these VMs, to escalate privileges in the tenant and, potentially, the AD domain.

Here are some of the general types of information that we will want to gather from the VMs:

  • Windows NTLM hashes and in-memory credentials
  • Credentials stored in VM extension settings
  • Sensitive files and local administrator password hashes

We have already covered finding managed identities and gathering tokens from them, but they are also a key target for extracting credential data from VMs.

Gathering local credentials with Mimikatz

While an entire book could be written on all the features of Mimikatz, we will just cover the basics that are needed for extracting credentials from Windows VMs. The most basic way of running Mimikatz is running...