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

Connecting and manipulating S3 buckets

Central file storage is conventional for organizations to secure and store data. If you have worked in IT, chances are you have had your fair share of run-ins with setting up Server Message Block (SMB) shares over Windows to allow file sharing between multiple hosts. Allowing files to be centrally resourced is a great way to collaborate and share information, as well as allowing personnel to access data remotely from another system. Setting up a file server, where data is stored – and retrieved – is nothing new. What is new is how we can store data in this same method, only now we can store it in the cloud using technology known as S3 – or Simple Storage Service if you want to spell it out.

So, what is S3? S3 is a simple storage system (as the name implies) and allows users to store data in the cloud. Just like how we store data on a file server, we can store data in what is known as an S3 bucket, which will hold the contents...