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

Understanding the MITRE ATT&CK framework

Depending on the scope, pentesting can become a large and cumbersome engagement that may have a severe impact on the quality of the pentest. When pentesting, we want to be able to provide both creative and real-world scenarios that we can use to engage our clients and customer networks and systems. During the pentest, we call our actions and methods TTPs – which stands for the following:

  • Tactics
  • Techniques
  • Procedures

These three words make up a large portion of how we pentest; however, if we don't really understand what they stand for, then we really cannot make use of them. To better understand them, we can apply them to an open knowledge base, known as the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and discuss these terms by applying them to real-world scenarios.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework allows us to develop our own methods and actions in the form of TTPs and fulfill the promise of quality engagement to...