Identify tools and techniques to secure and perform a penetration test on an AWS infrastructure using Kali Linux
Key Features
- Efficiently perform penetration testing techniques on your public cloud instances
- Learn not only to cover loopholes but also to automate security monitoring and alerting within your cloud-based deployment pipelines
- A step-by-step guide that will help you leverage the most widely used security platform to secure your AWS Cloud environment
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.
Karl Gilbert is a security researcher who has contributed to the security of some widely used open-source software. His primary interests relate to vulnerability research, 0-days, cloud security, secure DevOps, and CI/CD.
Benjamin Caudill is a security researcher and founder of pentesting firm Rhino Security Labs. Built on 10+ years of offensive security experience, Benjamin directed the company with research and development as its foundation, into a key resource for high-needs clients. Benjamin has also been a major contributor to AWS security research. With co-researcher Spencer Gietzen, the two have developed Pacu (the AWS exploitation framework) and identified dozens of new attack vectors in cloud architecture. Both GCP and Azure research are expected throughout 2019. As a regular contributor to the security industry, Benjamin been featured on CNN, Wired, Washington Post, and other major media outlets.
