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

Chapter 5: Understanding Vulnerable RDS Services

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides scalable and easy to set up cloud-based databases that allow users to operate them just as they would a typical database. RDS enables users to interact with databases via services such as MySQL and Amazon Aurora, just as a user would in a standard physical database infrastructure. The downfall of RDS is the same as regular databases – injection and misconfigurations.

In this chapter, we will go over what RDS is by discussing some key points and setting up an RDS database using MySQL. After setting up the database, we will scan it and then use it to apply syntax and learn necessary "movements" and commands that will allow us to navigate throughout a small MySQL database. Afterward, we will take a look at how severe weak passwords are by actually brute-forcing login credentials and finish up by understanding what SQL Injection (SQLi) is and what its impact is on databases...