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 vulnerable service applications

Vulnerable services are one of the worst things that can be part of your environment and one of the easiest, but not always the cheapest, things to fix. As applications get older, so does the code used to build the application, and while time advances, so do the vulnerabilities of the older application. Unfortunately, while simply patching or updating old software sounds easy, it's actually quite expensive and time-consuming. Updating an application can take copious amounts of time and bring down the service the application uses to function. This means a loss in revenue and usability.

In this next scenario, we will see the real damage produced by a vulnerable application on a network with AWS.

The scenario – discovering and attacking any low-hanging fruit

In this scenario, the client has requested a pentest for what they suspect to be a vulnerable application. This application is currently being hosted within its AWS...