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 credentials from Automation Accounts

One of the goals associated with many cloud environments is automation. This could be as simple as automating system configuration changes and patch management, or as complex as automatically rotating SSL certificates on web applications and storing them in key vaults.

These actions may be accomplished by running code in an Automation Account in a runbook. These runbooks are just code blocks stored in the Automation Account. The code can be in PowerShell or Python (2 or 3), and the in-browser editor makes it really easy to integrate common Azure management functions into the code.

Figure 6.55 – Options for runbook creation

There are a million different tasks that can be automated in Azure, but these actions often require access to a security principal in the tenant or credentials for external services. In the case of a security principal, a Run as account can be added to the Automation Account. This...