Hacking and Securing Cloud Infrastructure

Course contents

Whether you are an Architect, Developer, Pentester, Security or DevOps Engineer, or anyone with a need to understand and manage vulnerabilities in a Cloud environment, understanding relevant hacking techniques, and how to protect yourself from them, is critical. This class covers both the theory a well as a number of modern techniques that may be used to compromise various Cloud services and infrastructure

Prior pentest/security experience is not a strict requirement, however, some knowledge of Cloud Services and familiarity with common Unix command-line syntax will be beneficial.

INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD COMPUTING

• Introduction to cloud and why cloud security matters
• Comparison with conventional security models
• Shared responsibility model
• Legalities around Cloud Pentesting
• Attacking Cloud Services

ENUMERATION OF CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS

• DNS based enumeration
• OSINT techniques for cloud based asset

GAINING ENTRY VIA EXPOSED SERVICES

• Serverless based attacks (AWS Lambda / Azure & Google functions)
• Web application Attacks

ATTACKING SPECIFIC CLOUD SERVICES

• Storage Attacks
• Azure AD Attacks
• IAM Misconfiguration Attacks
• Roles and permissions based attacks
• Attacking Incognito misconfigurations

EXPLOITING KUBERNETES CLUSTERS AND CONTAINER AS A SERVICE

• Understanding how container technology works
• Exploiting docker environments and breaking out of containers
• K8s exploitation and breakouts
• Exploiting misconfigured containers

POST – EXPLOITATION

• Persistence in Cloud
• Post exploit enumeration
• Snapshot access
• Backdooring the account

AUDITING AND BENCHMARKING OF CLOUD

• Preparing for the audit
• Automated auditing via tools
• IaaS Auditing Windows and *nix Environments
• Golden Image / Docker image audits
• Relevant Benchmarks for cloud

DEFENDING THE CLOUD ENVIRONMENT

• Identification of cloud assets (AWS, Azure and GCP)
• Protection of Cloud Assets
• Principle of least privilege
• Control Plane and Data Plane Protection
• Metadata API Protection

DETECTION OF SECURITY ISSUES

• Setting up Monitoring and logging of the environment
• Identifying attack patterns from logs *
• Real time monitoring of logs *

RESPONSE TO ATTACKS

• Automated Defense techniques
• Cloud Defense Utilities
• Validation of Setup

PURPLE TEAMING WHERE RED AND BLUE EXCHANGE NOTES

CTF TO REINFORCE LEARNING

*Demo will be shown by the instructor, Lab time will be provided if time permits. Extended Lab access will be available for 30 days after the class.

Key Takeaways

Students will gain knowledge of attacking, exploiting and defending a variety of Cloud infrastructure. First, they will play the part of the hacker, compromising serverless apps, cloud machines, storage and database services, dormant assets and resources. Students will learn privilege escalation and pivoting techniques specific to cloud environments. This is followed by Infrastructure Defense, secure configuration, auditing, logging, benchmarks.

Students will learn preventive measures against cloud attacks, host-based defense and a number of cloud tools that can help in securing their services and resources. Apply the learning to:

Apply the learning to:

• Identify weaknesses in cloud deployment
• Fix the weaknesses in your cloud deployment
• Monitor your cloud environment for attacks