AZURE PENETRATION TESTING

Whether you are utilising classic Azure portal or Azure Resource Manager (ARM), pentesting azure applications or infrastructure helps you to assess and remediate the identified risks.

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Why is Azure Penetration Testing important?

Cloud computing model is solving bigger challenges than anyone can imagine in terms of flexibility, downtimes and saving substantial costs. Microsoft Azure has come across a great way in a few years, offering you to run Linux based applications in Azure.

As is the on-premises model of deploying secure configurations, Microsoft Azure offers multiple security services that are useful to businesses. Azure services are good for cloud users, but it is customer’s responsibility to maintain their environment. Additionally, scale and flexibility to customise services offered by Microsoft adds another dimension from security perspective.

We help you maximise your security investments by offering independent third-party azure cloud security assessments.

Common Azure security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations

Microsoft Azure’s rise is down to offering flexibility over resource management and easy deployment model. The Azure penetration testing checklist below is not the most extensive because we follow a tailored approach when scoping azure penetration testing assessments:

Azure misconfiguration issues
Azure Identity and Access Management (IAM) issues related to multi-factor authentication, insecure Azure AD hardening policies
Access permissions for Azure blob, Queue, Table, Files related to data leakage
Microsoft Azure storage encryption
Azure NSG (Network Security Groups) issues related to ingress/egress traffic and routing security
Azure AD security access controls
Auditing and Monitoring
Privilege Access Management
Azure Identity Protection and Network Watcher issues
Azure database control access (Database access and Application access)

What is and isn't allowed under Azure pen test scope?

An Azure penetration test differs from traditional security tests. All cloud providers have a clear policy of what is permitted when it comes to penetration testing customer environments. Microsoft red team and pen test rules of engagement are detailed here. Microsoft products that are named under ‘Microsoft Cloud’ definition permitted for penetration tests include the following:

Active Directory
Dynamics 365
Office 365
Azure DevOps
Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Account
Azure resources and service offerings

A general rule for the shared responsibility model in the cloud is:

Cloud provider is responsible for security of the cloud
Tenant or organisation client is responsible for security in the cloud

Any attacks launched during penetration tests meant to target the core infrastructure (related to DNS, Denial of Service, Protocols/Ports or request floods) is explicitly out of scope, as lined in the Microsoft pen test rules of engagement.

Azure pen testing services

Whether it’s for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), a platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS), we provide Azure pentest services ranging from Office 365 security, black box and white box penetration testing to security audits for specific assets.

The following are the most common security service offerings in addition to red team, azure application pentesting and API security testing.

Azure Penetration Testing

Azure Penetration testing 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. Pentesting Azure applications is covered in our web application offering.

Office 365 Security Audit

Cyphere Office 365 Security Audit includes a thorough review of your current setup against Office 365 security risks and ensure that your setup follows controls around Device Management, Account Policies, Application Permissions, Security Controls around authentication, exchange online, auditing & storage.

Azure Security Review

It is your responsibility to secure assets hosted in the cloud. This includes security center review, assessing Azure services and secure configuration baselines, policies and procedures against Azure resources, Azure active directory and Azure cloud Virtual Machines serving your staff and users internally in the cloud.

Benefits of penetration testing Azure assets

Microsoft Azure provides cloud resources, securing it is your responsibility.

Azure Pentest Methodology

Our security testing approach involves benchmark based assessments as well as standard pentest methodology extended to include Microsoft cloud specific security concerns. We support industry-leading testing standards and methodologies unless the scope is a red team:

OWASP
Mitre Att&ck Framework
Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES)
NIST SP 800-115

Step 1

Identity and Access Management

This phase involves reviewing identity and access management related controls. Generally, these include checks on the use of higher privilege accounts, use of MFA, password policy, IAM policies, access keys and credentials usage policies

Step 2

Review Authentication Architectures

Authentication and authorization problems are prevalent security risks. Most mobile apps or azure web applications implement user authentication. Even though part of the authentication and state management logic is performed by the back end service, authentication is such an integral part of most mobile app architectures that understanding its common implementations is important.

Step 3

Network Security

This area involves checks around network security controls such as ingress, egress rulesets, flow logging, traffic restrictions, and least access privileges.

Step 4

Logging API Calls, Events

All major cloud service providers offer web services that record API calls for tenant account. This information contains various parameters such as API source, calls details, requests/response elements. This phase includes a review of API calls for an account, log file validation, encryption at rest, access checks if logs are restricted from public view and access logging, configuration management and monitoring options.

Step 5

Monitoring

The monitoring phase is one of the critical tasks responsible for alerting relevant contacts during an incident. This involves reliance on the logging and related configuration parameters to ensure right metric filters are in place. These reviews include checks for real-time monitoring configuration, alarms for any changes made to access control lists, security policy/groups, routing tables, and related parameters.

Handy Reference

Learn more about Penetration Testing Services

Azure Active Directory Security

Whether in cloud or on-prem, active directory is the heart of Microsoft directory services offerings. Many businesses are already cloud-based, with some preferring a hybrid approach and remaining choosing to slow down with cloud adoption.

Understand in detail the differences between different services and concepts behind Azure AD and on-prem AD.