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

Avoiding communication breakdown

When pentesting, it's easy to get lost in the weeds and forget that there are people on the other side of the assessment that rely on you to discuss with them what is going on during the pentest. Too many times have I seen communication completely cutting out when a pentest begins, and there is no communication until the pentest stops. However, this shouldn't be the case – ever. 

When pentesting, your client is typically a little curious as to what you are doing and it is actually beneficial to keep them in the loop with what is going on. Why is it important? For more ways than one. Let's look at a couple of ways of how we can keep our engagement free-flowing with communication that allows everyone to be part of it and helps avoid any talking roadblocks that may come up.

Daily start and stop emails

Sending an email every time you start and stop a pentest allows your client to know when you're starting and gives...