Cloud Penetration Testing
AWS, Azure, GCP. Misconfigurations are the leading cause of cloud breaches. We audit IAM, network segmentation, storage exposure, secret management, and container security against real attack paths.
What Is Cloud Penetration Testing?
Cloud penetration testing assesses the security of infrastructure, platforms, and applications deployed on cloud providers. Testing covers AWS, Azure, and GCP environments, including instances, storage, databases, serverless functions, and Kubernetes clusters. The assessment focuses on identifying configuration errors, excessive permissions, and unintended exposure of services.
Misconfigurations are the leading cause of cloud breaches. Public S3 buckets, over-permissive IAM roles, exposed management interfaces, and unsegmented VPCs. We find these before an attacker does.
Services of a Cloud Pentest
AWS, Azure, GCP. Misconfigurations cause most cloud breaches. We test IAM, network segmentation, storage exposure, secret management, and container security against real attacker paths.
IAM and Access Management
Privilege escalation paths through IAM chain analysis. Overly permissive roles and policies. Unused and exposed access keys. Service account permissions. Cross-account and cross-role trust relationships. MFA configuration verification.
Network Configuration
Security group and firewall rule analysis. VPC/VNet configuration review. Inter-network connections and public exposure points. Peering and transit gateway evaluation. Network segmentation validation and trust boundary testing.
Storage and Data
S3 buckets, Azure Blob containers, GCP Cloud Storage. Public exposure analysis, access policy review, encryption validation. Detection of publicly accessible databases and data stores. Data classification validation.
Exposed Services
Identification of internet-facing APIs, administration consoles, databases, and services. Security group analysis, public IP exposure, load balancer configurations. NAT gateway and service endpoint evaluation.
Secret Management
Verification of secrets in environment variables, scripts, metadata, or code repositories. AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager access analysis. Permissions and access policies for vaults and certificates.
Container & Kubernetes
Docker and Kubernetes assessments. Container escape potential, RBAC misconfigurations, pod security standards. Exposed dashboards, etcd access, and image registry security. Container runtime protection analysis.
Testing Approaches
Three perspectives on cloud infrastructure.
Black Box
No credentials, no architecture diagrams. The tester discovers exposed services, public resources, and entry points from the internet. Simulates an external attacker with no inside knowledge of your cloud environment.
Best for: Measuring real-world cloud attack surface exposure.
Grey Box
Read-only cloud account access provided. The tester can enumerate resources, review configurations, identify IAM weaknesses, and map the full environment while also testing from the outside.
Best for: Comprehensive cloud configuration and exposure assessment.
White Box
Full access including Infrastructure as Code templates (Terraform, CloudFormation), architecture documentation, and privileged accounts. The tester can evaluate the deployment pipeline and identify weaknesses at every layer.
Best for: Pre-production validation, compliance-driven assessments, full coverage.
Methodology
Four phases. Cloud-native testing.
Reconnaissance
Cloud asset discovery, public exposure mapping, DNS enumeration, subdomain takeover checks, container registry analysis, and identification of all internet-facing entry points.
Identification
Configuration review, IAM policy analysis, network segmentation testing, storage exposure scanning, and container security evaluation. Both automated enumeration and manual verification.
Exploitation
Privilege escalation, lateral movement between cloud resources, container escape attempts, data exfiltration paths, and chain attacks demonstrating real-world breach scenarios.
Reporting
Findings mapped to CIS Benchmarks and vendor best practices. Architecture-level recommendations, IAM tightening guidance, and prioritised remediation aligned to business risk.
Our Technical Expertise
Multi-cloud. Multi-layer. Manual.
Multi-Cloud Experience
AWS, Azure, and GCP. We understand the shared responsibility model, provider-specific attack patterns, and the misconfigurations that differ between platforms. Each cloud has its own failure modes.
Infrastructure as Code Review
Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, and Pulumi. We review IaC for insecure defaults, hardcoded secrets, and configuration drift between template and deployed state.
Container & Kubernetes
Container escape techniques, Kubernetes RBAC analysis, pod security standards, admission controller evaluation, and supply chain security through image scanning and registry assessment.
CIS Benchmarks
We evaluate your cloud environment against CIS Foundations Benchmarks for AWS, Azure, and GCP. Hundreds of configuration checks covering IAM, logging, networking, storage, and monitoring.
Request a Cloud Pentest
Tell us about your cloud environment. We'll scope the engagement and send a quote within 48 hours.