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

What is penetration testing?

The term "penetration tester" is an interesting job title for a professional to have. While the job title may be a good conversation starter, and despite the funny remarks, penetration testing can be one of the most rewarding careers within cybersecurity. So, what is penetration testing, or pentesting?

Penetration testing is the evaluation of a system's attack surface through manual and automated exploitation. This involves using multiple sources to discover and exploit issues within systems. A system is a set of people, mechanisms, software, and policies that make up an entity (system).

Another way we can look at it is that pentesting highlights how systems work and reveals the vulnerabilities that leave them exposed to hacking, enabling the vulnerabilities to be corrected before adversaries can exploit them. This gives personnel an understanding of their technology, its security, and how attackers think about and exploit such systems...