CLOUD PENETRATION TESTING
Cloud adoption – there’s no two ways about it. The question remains – Whether a cloud service model provides a safe and secure cloud environment to its users? Hire us for cloud penetration testing services and let us identify cloud security vulnerabilities, insecure configurations, and controls within your cloud computing network infrastructure.
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Why do you need Cloud Penetration Testing Services?
An authorised cyber attack simulation exercise against cloud assets hosted on a cloud provider environment.
The main objective of cloud penetration testing or cloud pentesting is to identify and mitigate security risks in cloud computing. So that the cloud security posture, strengths and security weaknesses of cloud systems can be assessed. It is composed of external (Internet-facing) and internal cloud penetration test assessments.
Cloud security infrastructure is everyone’s business.
Gartner predicts that, through 2020, 95 percent of security failures in cloud environments will be the customer’s fault.
What can't be tested in the Cloud services?
Cloud technologies or cloud system that belongs to the cloud management such as underlying cloud infrastructure, cloud providers facilities, other partners or vendors cannot be tested in cloud penetration testing. For example, network stress test or DDoS simulation test, DNS Zone walking tests must be consulted with the cloud provider. Apart from major public cloud provider offerings, cloud models for a beginner can be fuzzy concepts, especially shared responsibility models. This simply means:
Cloud providers are responsible for security of the cloud
The tenant or organisation client is responsible for security in the cloud
The following diagram demonstrates the differences between shared responsibility models in the cloud. The following design principles are pillars to almost every cloud implementation.,
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Vulnerabilities identified during cloud security testing
In order to easily understand the different cloud security risks and security posture, this section provides examples with each risk mentioned below. Security risk areas remain the same, the underlying attack vector may change based on the cloud model and/or cloud platform vendors.
For instance, Amazon buckets have a history of security misconfiguration linked to S3 bucket data leakage. Azure blob storage has been the target too and subjects to Identity-based attacks. Office 365 tenancy security configuration is not in line with good security practices.
Intellectual Property Theft
When it comes to intellectual property theft, cloud pen testing can be a valuable service. By identifying vulnerabilities in the system, we can help organisations to better protect their data. Intellectual property theft often occurs when hackers gain access to sensitive information, such as trade secrets or customer data.
Compliance Violations and/or Regulatory Actions
Our cloud pen-testing can help organisations identify compliance violations. By simulating an attack, we can determine how well data is protected and identify any potential weaknesses. In addition, our pen testing can also help to assess whether an organisation’s security policies are adequate.
Data Breaches
Data breach vulnerability in cloud pentesting is becoming an increasingly important issue as more businesses rely on cloud-based services. There are a number of ways in which we find data breach vulnerability in cloud pentesting, but one of the most effective is to identify data sets that are potentially vulnerable to attack. While data breach vulnerability in cloud pentesting is a serious issue, it is important to remember that reputable cloud penetration test services can be used to effectively mitigate these risks.
Insider Cloud Security Threats
Insider threats are one of the major concerns for many organisations. While most companies focus on protecting their data and applications from external attacks, insider threats can be just as damaging. After all, insiders already have access to sensitive information and systems, making it easier for them to wreak havoc. We find them during a cloud configuration review and let the oranisations know before attacks.
Credential Attacks
Credential attacks are a type of hacking where criminals try to gain access to your accounts by using your login information. These attacks can be very difficult to prevent, because they usually involve guessing or stealing passwords. However, they can be minimised by working on vulnerabilities found in cloud penetration testing.
Insecure APIs
In a cloud infrastructure review, Insecure APIs are found which may not follow the recommended security practices. This could lead to vulnerabilities in the system which could be exploited by a malicious individual. In order to mitigate this, we recommend that organisations follow the strategies put forward by our cloud penetration testers.
DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks are a type of security breach that can target any type of online service. DDoS attacks work by flooding the target with requests from multiple computers, overwhelming the server and preventing legitimate users from accessing the service. DDoS attacks can cause significant disruption and downtime for organisations, which is why it’s important to be aware of DDoS attack vulnerabilities by using our cloud testing services.
Cloud Pen Testing Services
Azure Penetration Testing Cloud
Whether you are utilising classic portal or ARM.
Our cloud security assessments can help you assess and remediate the cloud security threats.
It also detects insecure misconfiguration in storage blobs, Azure services and products.
AWS Penetration Testing Cloud
These pentests include three different service areas, targeted at cloud pentest, external and internal cloud components.
Data Leakages, misconfiguration, Identity & Access Management, Networking, Logging & Monitoring are main pillars of AWS security strategy.
Office 365 Security Review
Cyphere Office365 Security Review includes a thorough review of your current setup against O365 risks and ensure that your setup follows Office 365 security controls around Device Management, Account Policies, App Permissions, Security Controls around authentication, exchange, auditing & storage.
Build Configuration Review
If a cloud-based server is unhardened or weakly configured, this leaves the underlying business vulnerable, leaving itself open to loss of reputation and other implications.
Data breaches and cyber-attacks are often due to leaky S3 buckets or general misconfigurations.
GCP Penetration Testing
Google cloud penetration testing to meet all your GCP security demands. These cloud penetration testing services cover different cloud infrastructure such as Software as a service solutions or PaaS security risks.
Our GCP security tests help you to assess and remediate risks to keep your assets with minimal attack surface.
SaaS Security Testing
Cyphere have the skill-set and extensive experience of working with most of the cloud service providers.
As shared cloud services concept is gaining more traction, risks of data leakage and implications are increasing with more blind spots than ever.
Why choose Cyphere for cloud penetration testing services?
Benefits of Cloud Pentesting Services
- Cloud penetration testing gives better visibility on cloud process aligning
- Secure validation of internal and third-party integrations
- Support ever changing regulatory/compliance requirements
- Cloud Penetration testing differ from other test because it ensures strong authentication, authorisation, encryption mechanisms
- Performing cloud penetration testing will demonstrate data security commitment
- Less is more - reduced costs, servers and staff
How to pentest cloud computing environments?
1. Understanding Cloud Provider
Understanding the policies of cloud providers – Almost all public cloud providers (aws cloud, google or azure services) have cloud pen testing processes in place. This is often known as the customer support policy for penetration testing cloud. This policy defines explicitly what activities are permitted and prohibited under cloud penetration testing exercise in their environment.
It is similar to other policies such as network stress testing, DDoS simulation testing. Examples of these cloud penetration test rules of engagement (such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google or Oracle Cloud Security Testing) or permission policies are available on cloud provider portals.
2. Creating a Pen Test Plan
Businesses looking to conduct testing cloud penetration testing (or security assessments) should have a cloud penetration test plan in place. This plan should include information related to applications, data access, network access, laws & regulations to comply with the cloud application security testing or databases and assessment approach (white box, grey box or black box). See our in-depth article for the basics of security reviews.
3. Vulnerability Identification Process
Constantly identifying vulnerabilities in cloud environments is very important. Cloud penetration testing ensures that no blind spots (such as vulnerabilities in the virtual machines facing the Internet) are present in your environment.
The right toolset (whether automated tools for vulnerability scanning or manual checks) is an important component of advisory services just like on-premises for cloud application security testing or a security audit. Both cloud and on-premises tools are available, and a thorough requirements analysis should be performed to finalise the correct approach.
4. Resource Risk Analysis
This phase is relevant to the previous one based on the tools and resources used. Correct tooling and security resource usage are the two most important aspects of vulnerability identification and analysis.
Using in-house teams to perform cloud penetration testing may miss certain findings due to close familiarity with the cloud environment. Cloud testing with the right cloud service provider is not an option these days, it’s the surest way to prove that your cloud assets are securing the underlying data.
5. Risk Remediation
Risk remediation is an important element, that feeds back into the risk management programme of an organisation. All risk advice is provided in our deliverables after cloud pentesting services and cloud environment to help the security team analyse and devise remediation plans. It includes a description of risks in the context of the environment, followed by attack probability and impact.
If required, Cyphere provides additional remediation consultancy given the complexity around risk and specific skill-set required for risk remediation of cloud penetration testing findings.
Your trusted Cloud penetration testing services provider
Cloud Security Penetration Test Methodology
Our cloud security offerings are based on extensive methodology we have developed with years of experience working across different sectors. It’s very important that a cyber security consultancy follows an approach that delivers right returns on your investment. At a high level, our approach towards pen testing cloud services is as follows:
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.
Review Authentication Architectures
Authentication and authorisation problems are prevalent common cloud vulnerabilities. Most mobile apps 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.
Network Security
This area involves checks around network security controls such as ingress, egress rulesets, flow logging, traffic restrictions, and least access privileges.
Logging API Calls, Events
Every major cloud services provider offers 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.
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.
