AWS Penetration Testing Tools

Since AWS is a leading cloud service provider, a large number of individuals all over the world rely on AWS for a variety of personal and professional needs. Despite the fact that these AWS services provide many benefits to their consumers, security concerns have increased. On the other hand, AWS offers its own security rules for applications and platforms, both automatic and manual. However, given the large number of cloud applications that individuals and organizations utilize on top of AWS, it is difficult to get around the lack of security visibility.

Penetration testing for their AWS infrastructure solutions can thus assist businesses in identifying and addressing security flaws and ensuring a strong security posture for protecting their online assets from cyber criminals.

This article will discuss the various tools used in AWS Penetration testing.

What is AWS Penetration testing?

Penetration testing on Amazon Web Services (AWS) assists enterprises in identifying and mitigating security risks in their AWS infrastructure. A Penetration test, often known as a pen test, simulates a cyber attack on your IT system to find exploitable flaws. It usually entails ethical hackers testing your system or network for weaknesses that malicious hackers could take advantage of. AWS, on the other hand, allows security testing for User-Operated Services, which are cloud offerings that the user creates and configures. For eight services, users can conduct security assessments or Penetration tests against their AWS infrastructure without prior authorization. These are:

• Amazon EC2 instances, NAT Gateways, and Elastic Load Balancers
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon CloudFront
• AWS Lambda and Lambda Edge functions
• Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon API Gateways
• Amazon Aurora
• AWS Fargate
• Amazon Lightsail resources

To know more, you can go through:

Why is AWS Penetration testing necessary?

The system becomes significantly more complex as AWS deploys additional services and serves millions of users. Because of the complexity, attackers may be able to exploit previously unknown flaws. When the human aspect is included, the problem becomes even worse. Cybersecurity professionals must do AWS Penetration testing to solve the many security problems in AWS settings. It can aid in the detection of misconfigured security groups and elevated access and assist with regulatory compliance, such as HIPAA and FedRAMP. Regular Penetration testing is required to discover, address, and repair compliance gaps for these and other compliance standards.

AWS Penetration testing tools:

In your AWS environment, you can use various tools to execute Penetration testing. Many independent and COTS solutions have been developed specifically for the cloud environment to aid in the understanding of AWS misconfigurations and faults.

• Kali Linux: Kali Linux is a Debian-based open-source Linux distribution focused on information security tasks like Penetration testing, security research, computer forensics, and reverse engineering. Its tools are ideal for AWS Penetration testing, which is used to find vulnerabilities in the AWS infrastructure.
• Metasploit: Metasploit is a framework for performing Penetration testing in the AWS cloud environment. We can use it to enumerate and perhaps attack Amazon Web Services.
• Nmap: It is a Linux command-line utility that scans a network for IP addresses and ports, as well as detects installed software. AWS services are used to do network scans.
• AWS Inspector: AWS Inspector is an IDS (Intrusion Detection System) that assists you in identifying vulnerabilities in your cloud-based application. It merely detects and offers you an assessment report on your application’s vulnerability, and you must take care of the prevention of the applications yourself.
• Cuckoo Sandbox: Adds support for AWS cloud features and enables executing emulation on auto-scaling infrastructure to the Cuckoo Sandbox open source projects.
• CloudSaw: It is a simple AWS command-line tool. This tool’s primary capabilities include built-in malware analysis and support for mobile devices. It is a small package that does not take up a lot of system resources and is excellent for AWS cloud testing.
• HeadBucket: It is helpful to see whether a bucket exists and whether or not you have permission to access it. It also detects S3 Buckets that have been misconfigured.
• CloudSploit: CloudSploit is a security and configuration scanner for AWS accounts that can discover thousands of threats. AWS offers the security tools, and CloudSploit guides you through their proper use. It checks the state of service configuration in your AWS IaaS accounts for potential security breaches and monitors activity in your accounts in real-time for suspicious behavior and insider threats.
• CloudJack: Due to disconnected Route53 and CloudFront settings, CloudJack checks AWS accounts for subdomain hijacking vulnerabilities.
• Prowler: AWS security best practices assessments, audits, incident response, continuous monitoring, hardening, and forensics readiness are all performed with Prowler, an open-source security tool. On the basis of a set of established benchmarks, it allows you to scan your AWS account for potential vulnerabilities, compliance, and IAM permissions.
• Cloudsplaining: It is an AWS IAM security assessment tool that evaluates IAM policies and creates an HTML report for further action. It can scan all policies in your AWS account or just one policy file.
• Astra Security Scan: It is a security testing tool for cloud infrastructure that allows you to pentest your AWS services and check for flaws. It comes with an interactive dashboard where you can keep track of the audit trail and see a thorough analysis of each detected vulnerability, as well as recommended fixes.

AWS Penetration testing with InfosecTrain

The number of attacks against the AWS cloud has expanded with its rising popularity. Knowing the risks associated with the AWS cloud can help you avoid damage, and AWS Penetration testing is required for this. You can enroll in InfosecTrain’s AWS Penetration testing course if you want to learn more about AWS Penetration testing. This course will assist you in developing a thorough grasp of the threat and security landscape in the AWS cloud and performing prospective Penetration testing tasks in this environment. To secure your AWS cloud environment, you will learn how to use Penetration testing and out-of-the-box cloud security solutions.

You can go through “Why Enroll in the AWS Cloud Penetration Testing Course with InfosecTrain?”

AUTHOR
Monika Kukreti ( )
Infosec Train

“ Monika Kukreti holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering. She is a voracious reader and a keen learner. She is passionate about writing technical blogs and articles. Currently, she is working as a content writer with InfosecTrain. “