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

Summary

As we saw in this chapter, there are many ways to attack VMs hosted in Azure. As a penetration tester, we need to be ready to attack VMs on multiple different levels. This could be at the platform level (running commands from the portal), the running operating system level (extracting credentials), or the operating system disk level (extracting hashes). All these skills combined will make us more well-rounded when attacking an Azure environment.

While VMs may have been one of the initial use cases of cloud services, more and more organizations are starting to build new applications as cloud-native deployments. This means that the applications depend on many of the platforms as a service resource in Azure. We will see many of the ways that we can attack those services in the next chapter.

In the following chapter, we will be taking a closer look at the Platform as a Service (PaaS) services in Azure, and how an attacker may be able to exploit configurations and gather credentials...