Book Image

Hands-On AWS Penetration Testing with Kali Linux

By : Karl Gilbert, Benjamin Caudill
Book Image

Hands-On AWS Penetration Testing with Kali Linux

By: Karl Gilbert, Benjamin Caudill

Overview of this book

The cloud is taking over the IT industry. Any organization housing a large amount of data or a large infrastructure has started moving cloud-ward — and AWS rules the roost when it comes to cloud service providers, with its closest competitor having less than half of its market share. This highlights the importance of security on the cloud, especially on AWS. While a lot has been said (and written) about how cloud environments can be secured, performing external security assessments in the form of pentests on AWS is still seen as a dark art. This book aims to help pentesters as well as seasoned system administrators with a hands-on approach to pentesting the various cloud services provided by Amazon through AWS using Kali Linux. To make things easier for novice pentesters, the book focuses on building a practice lab and refining penetration testing with Kali Linux on the cloud. This is helpful not only for beginners but also for pentesters who want to set up a pentesting environment in their private cloud, using Kali Linux to perform a white-box assessment of their own cloud resources. Besides this, the book covers a large variety of AWS services that are often overlooked during a pentest — from serverless infrastructure to automated deployment pipelines. By the end of this book, you will be able to identify possible vulnerable areas efficiently and secure your AWS cloud environment.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Kali Linux on AWS
5
Section 2: Pentesting AWS Elastic Compute Cloud Configuring and Securing
9
Section 3: Pentesting AWS Simple Storage Service Configuring and Securing
12
Section 4: AWS Identity Access Management Configuring and Securing
16
Section 5: Penetration Testing on Other AWS Services
20
Section 6: Attacking AWS Logging and Security Services
23
Section 7: Leveraging AWS Pentesting Tools for Real-World Attacks

Using Meterpreter for privilege escalation, pivoting, and persistence

Now comes the second phase of our exercise. Once we have the meterpreter shell, we will attempt to perform privilege escalation and get the highest possible privilege on this target server.

But first, let's learn more about our target server. Run the following command:

sysinfo

The output of the preceding command is as follows:

We are presented with a bunch of information, such as which version of Windows this machine is running, the domain, and so on.

As it is time to perform privilege escalation, issue the following command:

getsystem

If successful, you should typically get a response such as:

...got system via technique 1 (Named Pipe Impersonation (In Memory/Admin))

This means our privilege escalation was successful. To verify that, we can issue the following command:

getuid

If we are the highest privileged...