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

Kali Linux

Kali Linux is a Debian distribution that is offered for free by Offensive Security (www.offensive-security.com). Because of the growing importance of security, Kali Linux has become popular over the past few years. In fact, it's essential for anyone working in pentesting. This is due to the operating system coming preloaded with a bundle of security tools that don't have to be manually installed.

In this section, we will learn how to set up our own Kali Linux image locally on our own machine. The purpose of this exercise will be to make us more comfortable with Kali and also to teach you how to set up your own virtual machine. We will also use this Kali instance to interact with AWS throughout this book.

Setting up a Linux image

Setting up Kali Linux is easy. Follow along with the steps given here:

  1. We need to go grab a Kali image from the Offensive Security website. Ensure that you grab Kali Linux VirtualBox 64-bit version for VirtualBox: https...