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

Scripts to find private buckets

Scripting is a highly sought-after skill when it comes to cybersecurity because having the knowledge and ability to script tasks allows you to automate and provide results at a much more efficient rate while also executing another task. Scripting is also a great way to solve problems that may be unique – in this case, finding buckets that may not have a common name. Buckets can only have one unique name and no bucket is the same, so having a dictionary list of known buckets won't assist you directly. What that means is you'll need to make a modified version of the bucket names and place those in a text file that can be used to discover bucket names.

Now that we have a vast amount of knowledge on S3, let's take a look at a couple of scripts that you could use on your next pentest engagement. We will look at two popular languages: Python and Bash.

Python scripting

Python is a standard programming language in the security...