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

Setting up RDS (MySQL)

To set up an RDS database, we will be using an older version of MySQL. You'll be moving back and forth around RDS in the AWS console, so make sure you pin the RDS icon in your AWS console:

Figure 5.1 – Pinning RDS as a shortcut

After that, make sure you are in the region you've been working with in this book and continue to make a database. Remember, it is important that we select the region that we have been using for our environment throughout this entire book. This allows all our resources to remain geographically in the same place.

Follow the next instructions to create your own RDS instance:

  1. Click on the RDS icon you created, and then select Create database:

    Figure 5.2 – Creating a new database

  2. Next, you'll need to select a database – we will be using MySQL. Make sure you use an older version, if not the oldest version available:

    Figure 5.3 – Selecting MySQL

  3. After that...