Book Image

AWS Penetration Testing

By : Jonathan Helmus
Book Image

AWS Penetration Testing

By: Jonathan Helmus

Overview of this book

Cloud security has always been treated as the highest priority by AWS while designing a robust cloud infrastructure. AWS has now extended its support to allow users and security experts to perform penetration tests on its environment. This has not only revealed a number of loopholes and brought vulnerable points in their existing system to the fore, but has also opened up opportunities for organizations to build a secure cloud environment. This book teaches you how to perform penetration tests in a controlled AWS environment. You'll begin by performing security assessments of major AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda. Throughout the course of this book, you'll also learn about specific tests such as exploiting applications, testing permissions flaws, and discovering weak policies. Moving on, you'll discover how to establish private-cloud access through backdoor Lambda functions. As you advance, you'll explore the no-go areas where users can’t make changes due to vendor restrictions and find out how you can avoid being flagged to AWS in these cases. Finally, this book will take you through tips and tricks for securing your cloud environment in a professional way. By the end of this penetration testing book, you'll have become well-versed in a variety of ethical hacking techniques for securing your AWS environment against modern cyber threats.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Setting Up AWS and Pentesting Environments
4
Section 2: Pentesting the Cloud – Exploiting AWS
12
Section 3: Lessons Learned – Report Writing, Staying within Scope, and Continued Learning

Real pentesting with Metasploit

We have talked quite a bit about Metasploit throughout this book, and have even used a few modules within Metasploit to help us assess various exercises throughout this book – however, these examples have only been skimming the surface of what Metasploit really is and the potential it has with pentesting and ethical hacking in the cloud.

Metasploit has mixed reviews from some of us in the pentesting community because it helps automate a lot of our processes and can be thought of as being cheap or a script kiddie when relying on automated tools to help you pentest. However, coming from someone who pentests for a living, Metasploit provides a great advantage and automates a lot of the boring and easy stuff, as well as allowing you to focus on more detailed portions of an assessment that need a more manual approach. We will see, throughout this chapter, how to leverage Metasploit while also using other various techniques to help us exploit services...