AWS Penetration Testing
Secure your AWS environment before attackers exploit misconfigured IAM roles, exposed S3 buckets, or weak VPC security groups. Unchecked cloud misconfigurations enable lateral movement across EC2 instances, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration.
Cyphere’s CREST-approved AWS penetration testing covers your full cloud attack surface, including IAM policies, Lambda functions, RDS instances, and network controls. Actionable findings and tailored remediation guidance address vulnerabilities specific to your AWS architecture.
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AWS Pentest
Cloud-based move, whether it’s hybrid or cloud hosted, is a game changer for businesses. Flexibility, Pricing, Speedy setups and redundancy are a few top benefits of cloud computing model.
Depending upon the use of cloud sharing model, AWS security issues have varying impacts ranging from default configuration to internal attacks bypassing detection capabilities. A cloud based account compromise whether it’s your vendor or employee may lead to potentially disastrous results down to simple misconfiguration or secure hardening vulnerabilities.
For this reason, regular AWS pentesting assessments provide visibility into unknown areas shaping your business’ cloud security strategy.
AWS Pentesting and Vulnerability Scanning Techniques
The following list of assessment techniques is a high-level view based on the main components of AWS cloud infrastructure. Obviously, this includes more test cases when an assessment is conducted based on assets deployed and their implementation based on functionality to the cloud audience.
Lot of context including whether you require AWS vulnerability scanning or penetration testing is discussed and tailored during our scoping calls.
- Identify service and IAM misconfigurations
- Identify and exploit security vulnerabilities in Lambda functions or cloud hosting services
- Enumerate EC2 ‘User Data’
- Credentials exfiltration
- AWS NSG (Network Security Group) inbound/outbound access
- Unauthenticated S3 bucket access (private cloud access)
- Assess IAM permissions for exploitable opportunities or retrieve AWS access tokens
- AWS privilege escalation attempts
- Root certs
- SSH keys manipulation
- Publicly shared AMIs
- CloudTrail, GuardDuty evasions
Penetration testing AWS environment against defined security standards
One of the biggest changes when it comes to traditional vs AWS (Amazon Web Services) infrastructure is the ownership change. In the last few months, AWS infrastructure has updated their penetration testing authorization policy (AWS penetration testing request when you ask us to carry out work) to allow pen tests or security audit without prior approval for 8 permitted services (around user operated services and confiraution and implementation areas around vendor operated services):
- Amazon EC2 instances, NAT Gateways, Elastic Load Balancers
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon Aurora
- Amazon API Gateways
- AWS Lambda and Lambda Edge functions
- Amazon Lightsail resources
- Amazon Elastic Beanstalk environments
Anything that belongs to the below can’t be tested and is not allowed by AWS cloud:
- DNS attacks via Amazon Route 53 zones
- Denial of Service (DoS), DDoS or any simulations
- Port floods, Protocol floods
- Login request or API request flooding

SaaS Security Testing
Whether it’s the risk of regulatory fines, data breaches or product security for your customers, SaaS security testing is a must do before going live to ensure all vulnerabilities are remediated. Secure software is a critical component for SaaS vendors and this assurance helps achieve this objective.

AWS Penetration Testing
This refers to identifying and exploiting security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to simulate real-world cyber attacks. This exercise is helpful to identify, assess and remediate the high impact risks to your cloud environment.

AWS Security Review
It is your responsibility to secure assets hosted in the cloud. This includes underlying infrastructure secure configuration baselines, policies and procedures against AWS services and other products serving your staff and users internally in the cloud.
Key Benefits of AWS Cloud Pentest
- Assurance that your cloud infrastructure can withstand cloud-based attacks
- Validation of internal and third party integrations
- Comply with regulatory requirements
- Ensure strong AWS authentication, authorisation and encryption in place
- Ensure sufficient logging and monitoring controls
- Minimise costs and maximise your team efficient with pen test findings
Why choose Cyphere as your AWS penetration testing company?
Excellent people to work with.
"Very good knowledge of requirement and give us correct findings with excellent remedy to improve our security for our B2B portal site."
Harman was great, really knowledgeable
"Harman was great, really knowledgeable, helpful and on hand to answer any questions. The final report was very clear providing all the technical information."
My experience of the team was 5 star.
"They were so helpful, and their technical delivery and client communication were excellent."
Extremely satisfied
"Extremely satisfied with their approach, speed and end results that I got for my company. Big Thanks."
Experienced Team
"Great experienced team, very knowledgable and helpful, willing to adjust the product to suit the customer. Would recommend."
Professional Work
"A totally professional engagement from start to finish with the highest quality advice and guidance."
High Quality Testing Service
"The service provided by Cyphere is second to none. High quality testing services. Very reliable and professional approach."
Assured Service
"Cyphere provide a personal and assured service, focusing on both pre and post analysis in supporting us to change and embed a security cultured approach."
Recommended Service
"Highly recommend Cyphere for pen testing. The recommendations in the report were comprehensive and communicated so that technical and non-technical members of the team could follow them."
Recommended Pen Testing Service
"Cyphere were great in both carrying out our penetration testing and taking us through the results and remediation steps. We would gladly use them for future projects.
Highly Recommended
"We had penetration tests service for PCI DSS compliance program from the Cyphere! Very professional, efficient communication, great findings that improved our system security posture! Highly recommended!
Exceeded Expectations
"Harman and the team at Cyphere truly are experts in their field and provide an outstanding service! Always going above and beyond to exceed customer expectations.
Skilled Team
I’ve worked with Cyphere on a number of penetration tests in addition to some cyber essentials support and certification! I’ve found them to be highly skilled and professional.
Skilled Team
I’ve worked with Cyphere on a number of penetration tests in addition to some cyber essentials support and certification! I’ve found them to be highly skilled and professional.
Perceptive Reporting
Cyphere undertook pen testing for us recently. The process was very smooth, and the team were flexible in working around our constraints. The report was clear, actionable and perceptive.
Outstanding Cybersecurity Partner
Cyphere has been outstanding partner to our agency. I've tried many in the past but they have been extremely meticulous in getting our systems secured.
Helpful Services
Cyphere has been an excellent partner and helped us achieve our goals with a great level of expertise, communication and helpfulness making the whole process easy to understand and complete.
High Standards
Harman and his team were excellent throughout, they understood and completed the tasks (external penetration test) within tight deadlines to a high standard.
Communicative & Responsive Team
I had an amazing experience working with Cyphere! Their communication was top-notch, making the entire process smooth and efficient. I found their team to be incredibly responsive and attentive to my needs.
Efficient Service
Worked with team at Cyphere for a cyber security assessment, gap analysis etc. The team has delivered a very professional, efficient service at all stages of the process to date.
AWS Penetration Testing Methodology
Our AWS security audit approach involves benchmark based assessments as well as standard pentest methodology extended to include AWS specific security concerns and not use traditional pentesting as blanket methodology.
AWS cloud security specific threats
The following list includes contextual AWS cloud security threats identified and exploited by our penetration testers during the penetration tests carried out in the customer AWS accounts or cloud environments.
- Amazon Cognito authentication & authorisation used in mobile or web application
- Misconfiguration queues or topics utilising AWS platform or AWS CLI
- EC2 instances – Penetration testing of EC2 instances (Elastic Cloud Computing) is similar to performing security assessments such as virtual machines and operating systems security misconfigurations, file permissions and security vulnerabilities.
- AWS Storage – S3 buckets Bucket-level checks are needed to secure S3 buckets holding sensitive information, especially reviewing the process of how anonymous, semi-public, etc permissions are granted for everyone, authenticated users, and other groups within Amazon web services (AWS) accounts.
- ELB (Elastic Load Balancers) – ELB checks such as HTTP Request smuggling or security misconfigurations acorss AWS resources.
- Database security (Aurora, Redshift, RDS) checks covering public access, privilege access management, and roles.
- EBS (Elastic block store) volumes and snapshots access
- Configuration and implementation flaws across vendor operated services and Identity and access management areas, Logical Access Control