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.

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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
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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
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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.

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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.

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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

Why choose Cyphere as your AWS penetration testing company?

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
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