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

Scanning and examining targets for reconnaissance

Scanning is one of the essential portions of testing AWS. Scanning allows you to see the overall posture of your instances and their environment. Doing so will enable you to view open ports, vulnerabilities, and service versions that an attacker may be able to exploit easily. As we move through this book, we will begin to use more and more scanning techniques and execute them to enumerate and exploit services.

In a real pentesting scenario, you would typically have a list of assets that needed to be scanned – unless this is a black-box assessment, in which case you would not know any information about the network. You then take the list of assets and scan them with various tools. If you use a tool such as Nmap, your primary mission would be to discover open ports and services. Ports allow us different avenues into systems, and the services running on them can sometimes give us an easy way in if the service is vulnerable and...