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

Targeting WordPress for exploitation

For our first pentest, we will be pentesting a target application known as WordPress, a very popular website that is used for blogging and building websites swiftly and somewhat securely. It is not uncommon for WordPress websites to be a target during a pentest simply because they are fairly agile and super simple to start up – as we will see in a moment. If you want to find out more about WordPress, please go here: https://wordpress.com/.

Now, let's look at what the actual scenario is and what we are being requested to test, as well as how to test it.

Important note

The test requirements will vary from test to test. Some targets may only need initial access, while others will require full post-exploitation. This scenario is completely dependent on the client and what their needs are.

The scenario - gaining unauthorized access

In this scenario, we have been asked to target a WordPress website and see whether we can...