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

Learning about injection points

While we aren't going to do any "hands-on" with injection in this chapter, it's essential to understand what injection is, how it works, and why it's an issue that remains one of the top issues within web applications. We will look at a more hands-on implementation of injection in Chapter 6, Setting Up and Pentesting AWS Aurora RDS, when we set up a vulnerable environment for SQL injection exercises.

What is an injection?

An injection is a flaw within an application that allows malicious statements to be executed. While it may not seem "too evil," these statements can be statements that actually control databases – ultimately giving unauthorized users control of a system. This means that if not corrected, the flaw could allow malicious users to access sensitive data or even completely take over the database.

How does it work?

To start, a point of entry needs to be found; this is typically a vulnerable...