Course Description
This hands-on CTF-style training focuses on elevating your security knowledge into the cloud. Learn to defend your AWS & Azure cloud infrastructure by building automated detection, alerting and response pipelines for your workloads by using native cloud services. This training focuses on building security knowledge on the cloud and for the cloud.
This training takes both investigator and builder approach towards security. It teaches you the fundamentals of cloud infrastructure security and focuses on building highly scalable threat detection, monitoring, and response tools by using cloud-native services like serverless, containers, object stores, IAM/AD, logic apps, SQL/KQL queries and much more.
By the end of this training, we will be able to(applies to both AWS & Azure):
- Use cloud technologies to detect & build automated responses against IAM & AD attacks.
- Understand and mitigate advanced identity based attacks like pivoting and privilege escalation and build defense techniques against them.
- Use serverless functions to perform on-demand threat scans.
- Deploy containers to build threat detection services at scale.
- Build notification services to create detection alerts.
- Analyze malware-infected virtual machines to perform automated forensic investigations.
- Define step functions & logic apps to implement automated forensic artifacts collection for cloud resources.
- Build cloud security response playbooks for defense evasion, persistence and lateral movements.
- Perform advanced security investigations through architecting and deploying security data-lake for real-time threat intelligence and monitoring.
- Enforce multi-cloud security strategy through assessments, compliance checks and benchmarking automation.
Course contents
Introduction
- Quick Introduction to AWS & Azure cloud services.
- Basic terminologies: IAM, VPC, AMI, serverless, ARNs etc.
- Introduction to Logging services in cloud.
- Setting up your free tier account.
- Setting up AWS & Azure command-line interface.
Cloud Attack Surface
- Cloud service enumeration for attack surface identification.
- Exploiting serverless functions and harvesting cloud credentials.
Detecting and monitoring against AWS IAM attacks.
- Identity & Access management crash course.
- Policy enumeration from an attacker’s & defender’s perspective.
- Detecting and responding to user account brute force attempts.
- Building controls against privilege escalation and access permission flaws.
- Attacking and defending against user role enumeration.
- Brute force attack detection using cloudTrail & Athena SQL queries.
- Automated notification for alarms and alerts.
- Exercise on detecting IAM attacks in a simulated environment containing web application compromise and lateral movement.
MALWARE DETECTION AND INVESTIGATION ON/FOR CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE
- Quick Introduction to cloud infrastructure security.
- Building clamAV & Yara based static scanner for S3 buckets using AWS lambda.
- Building signature update pipelines using static storage buckets to detect recent threats.
- Malware alert notification through SNS and slack channel.
- Adding advanced context to slack notification for quick remediation.
- Exercise on simulating a malware infection in AWS and building an automated detection & alerting system.
Threat Response & Intelligence analysis techniques on/for Cloud infrastructure
- Integrating playbooks for threat feed ingestion and Virustotal lookups.
- Building a SIEM-like service for advance alerting and threat intelligence gathering using Elasticsearch.
- Creating a Security datalake for advance analytics and intelligence search.
- Building dashboards and queries for real-time monitoring and analytics.
- CTF exercise to correlate multiple logs to determine the source of infection.
Azure AD Attacks & Defenses
- Azure AD enumeration & permission gathering.
- Privilege escalation & lateral movement through RBAC, service principals etc.
- Auditing & logging in Azure.
- Detecting attacks through KQL queries.
Forensic Acquisition & analysis In the Cloud.
- Building an IR ‘flight simulator’ in the cloud(AWS).
- Creating an API service for automated instance isolation and volume snapshots(AWS).
- lambda functions to perform instance isolation and status alerts(AWS). – Automating alert using Sentinel(Azure) for threat analysis.
- Automating threat response through Azure logic apps.
- Implementing rulebook for cloud IR in an enterprise.
- Enforcing security measures and policies to avoid instance compromise.
Multi-cloud Compliance
- Building a multi-cloud security assessment & monitoring strategy.
- Automatic inventory and change detection in a multi-cloud environment.
- Implementing compliance standards and benchmark standards(CIS) to the cloud environment.
What would the attendees gain?
This is a unique course that is on the cloud and for the cloud. It helps train individuals on cloud terminologies and enables them to build scalable defense mechanisms for their services running in the public cloud. The training explicitly focuses on threat detection, Incident response, malware investigations, and forensic analysis of cloud infrastructure which is still a very less known domain in the market.
The training is not going to use cloud-native security tools, but going to focus more on building analysis pipelines that are generic and can be implemented in any cloud environment.
WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE?
- Red Team members
- Blue team and Purple team members
- Cloud Security Teams
- Incident responders, Analysts
- Malware investigators and Analysts
- Threat intelligence analysts and Responders
Requirements
- Basic understanding of cloud services.
- System administration and linux cli.
- Able to write basic programs in python.
- Familiarity with SQL and KQL queries will be a plus.
System Requirements
- Laptop with internet access.
- Free tier account for AWS with commandline tools installed.
- Free Tier account for Azure with commandline tools installed.
Read and complete the pre-training briefing document that will be sent a week before the training date.
Trainer Biography
Abhinav Singh is a cybersecurity researcher with a decade long experience working for global leaders in security technology, financial institutions and as an independent trainer/consultant. He is the author of Metasploit Penetration Pesting Cookbook (first, second & third editions) and Instant Wireshark Starter, by Packt.
He is an active contributor to the security community in the form of patents, open-source tools, paper publications, articles, and blogs. His work has been quoted in several security and privacy magazines, and digital portals. He is a frequent speaker and trainer at eminent international conferences like BlackHat, RSA & Defcon. His areas of expertise include malware research, reverse engineering, enterprise security, forensics, and cloud security.
