AWS is a top cloud service provider and many people around the globe rely on it for their personal and professional needs. Although these AWS services offer many benefits to their customers, security concerns have increased. AWS has its own security rules, both manual and automatic, for applications and platforms. It is difficult to overcome the lack of security visibility due to the sheer number of cloud applications individuals and organizations use on top of AWS.
Penetration testing of AWS infrastructure solutions can help businesses identify and address security flaws and ensure a strong security posture to protect their online assets against cyber criminals.
This article will cover the different tools used in AWS Penetration Testing.
What is AWS Penetration testing?
Penetration testing with Amazon Web Services (AWS), assists enterprises in identifying security risks in their AWS infrastructure. A Penetration test is also known as a Pen Test. It simulates a cyber attack against your IT system in order to identify exploitable flaws. This involves ethical hackers testing your network or system for vulnerabilities that malicious hackers could exploit. AWS allows security testing for User Operated Services. These are cloud offerings that the user creates or configures. Users can perform security assessments and penetration tests against their AWS infrastructure for eight services without authorization. These include:
Amazon EC2 instances, NAT gateways, and elastic load balancers
Amazon RDS
Amazon CloudFront
AWS Lambda Edge and Lambda Lambda functions
Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon API Gateways
Amazon Aurora
AWS Fargate
Amazon Lightsail resources
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Why is AWS penetration testing necessary?
As AWS adds new services and serves millions of customers, the system becomes more complex. Attackers may be able exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities due to the complexity of the system. The problem gets worse when you add the human element. AWS Penetration testing is required by cybersecurity professionals to identify and fix security issues in AWS settings. It can help detect misconfigured security groups or elevated access, and aid with regulatory compliance such as FedRAMP and HIPAA. Regular penetration testing is necessary to identify, address, and fix compliance gaps for these and other compliance standards.
AWS Penetration testing tools
You can use a variety of tools to perform penetration testing in your AWS environment. To help you understand AWS faults and misconfigurations, there are many COTS and independent solutions.
Kali Linux: Kali Linux, a Debian-based, open-source Linux distribution, focuses on information security tasks such as Penetration testing and computer forensics. Its tools are ideal to perform AWS Penetration Testing, which is used for finding vulnerabilities in AWS infrastructure.
Metasploit: Metasploit allows you to perform penetration testing in the AWS cloud environment. It can be used to enumerate or attack Amazon Web Services.
Nmap: This Linux command-line utility scans a network looking for IP addresses and ports. It also detects any software that is installed. Network scans can be done using AWS services.
AWS Inspector: AWS inspector is an IDS (Intrusion Detection System), which assists you in identifying potential vulnerabilities in your cloud-based applications. It will only detect and give you an assessment report about your application’s vulnerability. You must then take responsibility for the prevention of such applications.
Cuckoo Sandbox – Adds support for AWS cloud services and allows execution of emulation of auto-scaling infrastructure to Cuckoo Sandbox opensource projects.
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