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 connecting to AWS

Now we are going to be scanning systems inside of AWS. This plays an important part in pentesting because, as we mentioned, scanning and enumeration comprise the first technical portion of pentesting AWS and general pentesting engagements. It's important to know where to start when beginning to pentest AWS environments. Assuming that all prerequisites have been met, and all things are in order, moving forward with scanning and connecting to instances should be the next logical component of testing AWS.

Before we begin, ensure that your Windows host is up and running. Log into the AWS management console and look back at Chapter 1, Building Your AWS Environment, if you need a refresher – then return back here.

Once you're ready to go, we are going to move forward and start using Nmap to scan our AWS environment.

Scanning with Nmap

Now let's put Nmap into action and use it to check out the Windows 2008 server and poke...