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

Leveraging web apps for lateral movement and escalation

Azure web apps are commonly used in subscriptions to host web applications and APIs. While we have previously mentioned abusing managed identities, we have not covered how the applications are typically managed.

Application code can be applied to App Service hosts in multiple different ways. The Deployment Center can integrate with a number of different code repository solutions to synchronize with CI/CD pipelines, or code can be pushed through manual deployments.

Figure 6.48 – App Service Deployment Center

Application code can be manually copied to systems by using credentials stored in the publish profile. This profile contains the following credential options:

  • Web Deploy
  • FTP
  • ReadOnly FTP
  • Zip Deploy
  • Database Connection Strings

As an attacker with the Contributor role on the App Service application, we can access this publish profile to gain access to the credentials...