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

Creating, attaching, and detaching new EBS volumes from EC2 instances

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create, attach, and mount an EBS volume to an Ubuntu EC2 instance. We will then create and delete some files, detach this, and then try to extract the deleted data:

  1. Go to EC2 | Volumes and create a new volume. For this exercise, we are creating an additional volume size of 8 GB:

If you want your volume to be encrypted (this is optional), perform the following steps:

    1. Select the checkbox for Encrypt this volume
    2. Select the Key Management Service (KMS) Customer Master Key (CMK) to be used under Master Key
    3. Select Create Volume
  1. Select the created volume, right-click, and then select the Attach Volume option.
  2. Select the Ubuntu instance from the Instance textbox:
  1. Secure shell (SSH) into your Ubuntu instance and list the available disks using the following command:
  2. ...