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

Operating systems

On your pentesting journey, you will come across multiple different operating systems. Various operating systems have different uses, including as servers, host clients, or cloud environments. It's important to understand these various operating systems because you will need to understand the ways they work in their environments. For this section, we will discuss some aspects of Linux and Windows systems that you ought to know about when pentesting.

Linux/Unix

Linux is an open source operating system based on the Unix platform. It's seen on quite a few devices and servers that we currently use, so it's important that you understand some of the basics about it. It is open source, so it has an open platform for collaboration that allows other developers to work on it, meaning you can add your own code and bug fixes.

Linux comes in many different "flavors" of operating system, such as Debian – which Kali is – Fedora...