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

Chapter 2: Pentesting and Ethical Hacking

The following chapter discusses penetration testing, also known as pentesting. Pentesting is something that grew out of computer concerns during the 1960s. As computer systems began to distribute data more, ensuring the security of that data became crucial. After much discussion of how communication lines could be penetrated, it was recommended that some type of "penetration assessment" be used to assess computer systems and communication lines with "real threat-like" assessments. Moving forward to the early 1970s, tiger teams were created as the first penetration testing teams and carried out operations similar to the tactics you will see and read about in this book. The primary responsibility of these tiger teams was to discover vulnerabilities and assess the threat impact level based on manually exploiting the vulnerabilities found.

Fast-forward to today, and the world of pentesting is growing in popularity and is...