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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about Aurora and its uses within AWS. We set up our own Aurora instance and learned how to look for misconfigurations by using common pentesting techniques. Moving on, we learned how to set up a SQLi lab in an EC2 instance and practiced some common injection methods that you would see in a real-life pentest. We finished up the chapter by talking about DoS attacks and their impact on businesses.

Now that you have completed this chapter, you're able to set up your own labs within AWS that allow you to test SQLi attacks in a safe and authorized environment, as well as understand the basics of pentesting Amazon Aurora.

In the next chapter, we are going to take a look at Lambda services and learning how to look for misconfigurations within Lambda.