Hands-On AWS Penetration Testing with Kali Linux: Set up a virtual lab and pentest major AWS services, including EC2, S3, Lambda, and CloudFormation

Book Description

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, there is a lot of in-depth coverage of the 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.

What you will learn

• Familiarize yourself with and pentest the most common external-facing AWS services
• Audit your own infrastructure and identify flaws, weaknesses, and loopholes
• Demonstrate the process of lateral and vertical movement through a partially compromised AWS account
• Maintain stealth and persistence within a compromised AWS account
• Master a hands-on approach to pentesting
• Discover a number of automated tools to ease the process of continuously assessing and improving the security stance of an AWS infrastructure

Who this book is for

If you are a security analyst or a penetration tester and are interested in exploiting Cloud environments to reveal vulnerable areas and secure them, then this book is for you.

A basic understanding of penetration testing, cloud computing, and its security concepts is mandatory.

Table of Contents

1. Setting Up a Pentesting Lab on AWS
2. Setting Up a Kali PentestBox on the Cloud
3. Exploitation on the Cloud using Kali Linux
4. Setting Up Your First EC2 Instances
5. Penetration Testing of EC2 Instances using Kali Linux
6. Elastic Block Stores and Snapshots – Retrieving Deleted Data
7. Reconnaissance – Identifying Vulnerable S3 Buckets
8. Exploiting Permissive S3 Buckets for Fun and Profit
9. Identity Access Management on AWS
10. Privilege Escalation of AWS Accounts Using Stolen Keys, Boto3, and Pacu
11. Using Boto3 and Pacu to Maintain AWS Persistence
12. Security and Pentesting of AWS Lambda
13. Pentesting and Securing AWS RDS
14. Targeting Other Services
15. Pentesting CloudTrail
16. GuardDuty
17. Using Scout Suite for AWS Security Auditing
18. Using Pacu for AWS Pentesting
19. Putting it All Together – Real – World AWS Pentesting