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

Escalating from subscription Owner to Azure AD roles

As part of a pentest, you could also be interested in pivoting from an Azure subscription to Azure AD. This objective could be part of an attack chain that has a goal of opening backdoors in Azure AD for persistence. We will cover the topic of persistence in Chapter 8, Persisting in Azure Environments. Here are some techniques that could be leveraged to achieve this.

Path 1 – Exploiting privileged service principals

Similar to user accounts, service principals and managed identities can also be assigned to Azure AD roles. Many attackers consider service principals and managed identities to be easier targets as they are usually excluded from security policies such as conditional access and MFA.

An attacker could exploit the privileges of an Azure AD account with rights to service principals or managed identities to gain access to the security privileged principals. This is a possible path, but it may be rare for you...