Cloud Penetration Testing
The risk of data leakage and data breach increases significantly as organizations and individuals transfer and host data to cloud services accessible to the public. Most attack vectors against virtualized and cloud environments are unknown even to hosting providers.
This causes big security holes and opens up new attack vectors for dark hackers. An attacker can buy accommodation in a cloud installation to gain access with their new DMZ cloud. For a dark hacker, it’s like “move to the side and look over the fence” with much more direct attack techniques, which can be used to avoid and jump access controls. Most hosting in the cloud is implemented in virtual infrastructure, which causes virtualization threats that can be accessed by attackers.
To obtain a complete view of the real risks within your virtual environment / cloud, it is very important to perform penetration tests (pentesting) to validate the existing controls, assign defenses and resources to correct the real faults, taking quick actions minimizing the possibility of execution of critical events. Additionally, it generates protection of your business intelligence, data and IT systems, brand and reputation.
Penetration tests (without being limited to) include:
- Application programming interface (API) (for example, HTTP / HTTPS)
- Web and mobile applications hosted by your organization.
- The application server and the associated language (for example, programming languages such as Python, React)
- Virtual machines and operating systems.
- Virtual access control test: Uses a variety of techniques to manipulate virtual network access controls.
- Hypervisor penetration test: Exploits the virtual machine’s escape vulnerabilities to traverse the hypervisor layer and gain control over the entire virtual environment.
- Virtualization management attacks: Manipulate and compromise management systems.
- Infrastructure penetration tests in the cloud: Focus on the escalation of privileges within the cloud environment.
- Penetration tests of applications in the cloud: They focus on the identification of vulnerabilities and access control failures within the cloud-based application.