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

AWS Regions and Availability Zones

There are a few things we should discuss before getting started with S3. It is essential to understand how AWS houses data because knowing the how and why helps us to understand the fundamentals a little better. Having a fundamental understanding allows us to further understand what we already know and go from there. To help us understand this a little better, let's discuss the infrastructure a bit before diving into S3.

Just like local servers are typically stored on-premises, near your business or organization, it's prudent to host information held in AWS as close to you as possible. What I mean is using systems that are geographically located near you to help support your mission with cloud-based resources. Well, this is where AWS Regions come into play in allowing you to geographically allocate resources based on your needs and locations. These geographically located areas known as Regions can be found in AWS. You can look at the...