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

Understanding RDS

RDS allows users to stand up, scale, and operate relational database services without all the headache that comes with standing up your very own database servers. Aside from not having to locally allocate hardware and resources, RDS aims to lower the cost of ownership, which in turn allows companies to focus more on their own business goals and worry less about technology needs. Self-hosting databases tend to take up lots of time, money, and manpower – RDS enables owners to only need to create and configure their cloud database setup.

Let's take a quick look at some of the advantages of using RDS.

Advantages of using RDS

There are numerous benefits and plus points as to why RDS is a great way to stand up databases for an infrastructure. Besides some of the ones that we have briefly already mentioned, it's good to know how we can scale quickly and securely with AWS and its related services.

Let's look at some quick points as to...