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

Avoiding DoS

DoS is a serious web application vulnerability that has the ability to disrupt the availability of services and applications. The goal of DoS is to shut down the target network, service, or application and make it inaccessible to users and administrators – however, ultimately, users are the primary target audience.

A much more sophisticated and disruptive version of a DoS attack is DDoS attack – using multiple attacker machines to attack a target host. DDoS attacks are often highly skilled and planned attacks that use botnets to unleash large volumes of unwanted traffic towards a target.

Important note

A botnet is a large cluster of compromised machines used to carry out malicious attacks unknown to the owners of those machines.

DDoS attacks have two very distinct classifications:

  • Infrastructure-layer attacks
  • Application-layer attacks

Let's take a quick look at what both of these classifications detail. While we won...