Hacking and Securing Cloud Infrastructure
Cut through the mystery of cloud services on our 4 day course.
This 4-day course cuts through the mystery of Cloud Services (including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform) to uncover the vulnerabilities that lie beneath. We will cover a number of popular services and delve into both what makes them different, and what makes them the same, as compared to hacking and securing traditional network infrastructure. 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 knowing how to protect yourself from them is critical. This course covers both the theory as 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.
Note: Students will have access to a state-of-the-art Hacklab with a wide variety of vulnerabilities to practice exploitation and will receive a FREE 1 month subscription after the class to allow more practice time along with the support portal to clear doubts..
Highlights of our Training:
What delegates love:
- Our labs: probably the biggest selling point for our courses. Not only will you spend most of the course hacking hands-on in a lifelike web environment, but you’ll also have 30+ days access to practice your new skills afterwards
- Individual access: you’ll have your own infrastructure to play with, enabling you to hackat your own speed
- Real-world learning: where many leading cybersecurity training courses are based on theory, our scenario-led, research-based approach ensures you learn how real threat actors think and act
- Specialist-led training: you’ll learn from highly skilled and experienced practicingpenetration testers and red teamers
- Up-to-date content: our syllabus remains so relevant, delegates come back year afteryear for more
- Auditing and benchmarking of Cloud
- Remediations included: you’ll learn how to fix as well as find vulnerabilities
Outcomes for budget holders
This course is designed to bring your in-house cloud security testing competency up to the industry standard, helping you:
- Lower the likelihood of security incidents by identifying weaknesses in your cloud infrastructure.
- Improve your understanding of the organization’s risk posture based on the frequency and severity of weaknesses identified.
- Improve the organization’s approach to access control management.
- Create a stronger case for securing software development, cloud deployment, and governance practices.
- Develop a secure cloud roadmap that balances growth and risk.
- Implement cloud-based attack detection and response tactics.
- Build a closer relationship between development and security teams.
- Nurture and retain passionate, highly skilled, and security conscious employees.
- Demonstrate commitment to security through training, compliance, and change management.
- Develop the organization’s competitive advantage for security-conscious customers.
4 day Course
Available by Partners
Live, online available
Hack-Lab available
Basic
Course Overview
As cloud innovation gives birth to new technologies and new threats, now is the time to modernize your cloud security skills and bring them up to the industry standard. Join this hands-on, 4-day course to push your cloud hacking and vulnerability remediation skills to the next level and widen your career prospects. Get your hands dirty with our popular virtual labs and learn from experienced, practicing penetration testers with a legacy of training at Black Hat.
Interested?
1. Our courses are available directly from us; through our training partners or at worldwide technical conferences.
2. You can find course dates and prices on the Courses and Webinars page.
3. Take a look below at a few of the upcoming courses for this specific training.
4. For more information including private course requests, complete the short form below.
Courses and webinars
Booking enquiries
Select the course from the Courses and Webinars Page.
Click here for course dates and prices
For private course delivery enquiries or other information, please use the form alongside.
The course is also available from our partners listed below.
If booked through Check Point, Cyber-Security Leraning Credits are accepted for this course.
For security and IT decision makers
What’s the real impact of training your team through NotSoSecure?
Uncover and harden your organisation’s cloud attack surface by building a team that can test, identify, and guide developers to remediate – and further avoid – the emergence of cloud-based vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Trained delegates can:
- Perform testing to identify and safely exploit complex vulnerabilities and security misconfigurations in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Design this testing around real-world attacker behaviour and tooling, making it relevant to the threats facing your organisation.
- Identify the attack surface exposure created by cloud-based services such as virtual machines (VMs), buckets, container as a service (CaaS) platforms, and serverless functions.
- Exploit, defend, and audit containerisation environments.
- Collaboratively plan cloud defence strategies that include patching, asset inventory management, and other security controls.
- Recommend and help implement cloud-based attack detection and response tactics.
- Understand the business impact of cloud misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, and articulate this to key stakeholders.
- Contribute to a secure cloud roadmap by understanding the balance between cloud growth and risk and the implications of different cloud architecture models.
- Take on greater responsibility in the team and become an advocate of security in the wider business.
You will be able to:
You’ll be learning hands on:
- Spending most of the session (~60%) on lab-based exercises.
- Using lab-based flows to explore and hack lifelike cloud environments.
- Exploiting, defending, and auditing different cloud and container environments.
- Competing in a Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge to test your new skills.
- Discussing case studies with your course leader to understand the real-world impact of the hacks covered
You will receive:
This course uses a Defense by Offense methodology based on real world offensive research (not theory). That means everything we teach has been tried and tested on live environments and in our labs and can be applied once the course is over. By the end, you’ll know how to:
- Certificate of completion
- 30 days lab access post-course completion (with the opportunity to extend)
- 8 Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits awarded per day of training fulfilled
- Learning pack, including question & answer sheets, setup documents, and command cheat sheets
What you can take away from the course:
- Think and behave like an advanced, real-world threat actor.
- Identify and exploit complex security misconfigurations in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Design your penetration tests around real-world attacker behaviors and tooling, making it relevant to the threats facing your organization.
- Identify the attack surface exposure created by cloud-based services such as virtual machines (VMs), buckets, container as a service (CaaS) platform, and serverless functions.
- Support cloud defense strategies that include patching, asset inventory management, and other security controls.
Why it is relevant
The cybersecurity skills shortage is felt perhaps nowhere as deeply as in the cloud. With new rulebooks and standards, practitioners often find themselves playing catch up with the latest developments in technology and in the threat landscape. This course is designed to be a highly informative bootcamp to help you advance your skills in the most important and relevant areas of cloudsec. Across four days, you’ll learn about the high-impact vulnerabilities and flaws that could be open in your organization right now and how to fix them.
Our syllabuses are revised regularly to reflect the latest in-the-wild hacks, the newest system releases, and whatever proof of concepts we’ve been developing in our own research. Because they remain so up to date with the threat landscape and security industry standard, many delegates return every 1-2 years to update their skills and get a refresh.
The free 30 day lab access provides attendee additional time to learn advanced topics in their own time and at their own pace.
Details of the course content:
INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD COMPUTING
- Introduction to the 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
- Open-Source Intelligence Gathering (OSINT) techniques for cloud-based asset identification.
- Username enumeration
ATTACK SURFACE OF CLOUD SERVICES
- Understanding Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Attack Surface
- Understanding Function as a Service (FaaS) Attack Surface
- Understanding Platform as a Service (PaaS) Attack Surface
- Understanding Container as a Service (CaaS) Attack Surface
ATTACKING CLOUD STORAGE
- Introduction to AWS S3
- AWS S3 Misconfigurations
- Introduction to GCP Storage
- Introduction to Azure Storage
- Azure: Shared Access Signature (SAS) URL Misconfiguration
ATTACKING MICROSOFT AZURE AD ENVIRONMENT
- Introduction to Azure and Microsoft Entra ID
- Azure Application Attacks on App Service, Function App, and Storages
- Azure Database
- Automation Account
- Azure Key Vault
- Introduction to Microsoft Entra ID Authentication Methods and Risks
- Microsoft Entra ID Attacks (Managed User Identities)
- Bypassing MFA Security and Conditional Access Policy
- Abusing Dynamic Membership Policy
- Azure Identity Protection to Monitor User Behaviour
ATTACKING AWS ENVIRONMENT
- Introduction to the AWS IAM Policies and Shadow Admin Permissions
- Understand AWS Policy Evaluation Logic
- IAM Misconfiguration (Identity Based Policy, and Resource Based Policy)
- Enumerate Roles using PACU
- Gaining Access to EC2 Instance by Abusing Instance Attribute
- PaaS Service exploitation and understand the pitfall of default permissions.
- Attacking AWS Cognito misconfiguration
- Stealing sensitive information from ECR and ECS deployment.
- Exploit Lambda and API Gateway.
- Exploiting internal service using Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) misconfiguration (demo only)
- Introduction to AWS Organisation.
- Understand Delegated administrator for AWS Organisations and, it’s risk.
ATTACKING GCP ENVIRONMENT
- Introduction to GCP
- Introduction to IAM Role, Service account
- Understanding the Authentication in GCP
- Introduction to Compute Engine and Cloud Storage
- Understanding App Engine, IAP
- Database: Firestore/Firebase
- Cloud Function and Cloud Storage
- Pub/Sub and Cloud Run
- IAM Impersonation and Secret Manager
- Container Registry
REVISITING AWS, AZURE AND GCP MISCONFIGURATIO NS IN HARDENED ENVIRONMENT
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Azure MFA Bypass
- Azure Key Vault
- Elastic Beanstalk
- AWS IAM Misconfigurations
- ECS and ECR
- AWS Cognito
- GCP IAM
- GCP IAP
CLOUD DEFENCE USING OPEN- SOURCE AND CLOUD-NATIVE TOOLS
- Identification of Cloud Assets
- Hybrid Account Asset Inventory
- AWS Multi-Account Asset Inventory using Open Source Tools
- Protection of Cloud Assets
- Principle of Least Privilege (with examples like EC2, IAM, RDS, etc.)
- Financial Protections by Enabling Budgets
- Metadata API Protection
- Demo of Metadata API Protection using Linux Firewall Rules
- Monitoring Cloud Activities using Cloud Native Tools
- Hybrid Cloud Account Monitoring Strategy
- Automated Response in Cloud Against Malicious Activities
- Response to Attacks Using AWS Config
CLOUD AUDITING AND BENCHMARKING
- Preparing for the audit
- Automated auditing via tools
- Golden image/Docker image audits
- Windows Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) auditing
- Linux IaaS auditing
- Relevant benchmarks for cloud
CAPTURE THE FLAG
- A timed competition to test your new skills and reinforce everything you’ve learnt
Prerequisites
Who Should Take This Class?
- Cloud administrators and architects
- Penetration testers and red teamers
- CSIRT/SOC analysts and engineers/blue teams
- Developers
- Security/IT managers and team leads
Delegates must have the following to make the most of the course:
- Basic to intermediate knowledge of cybersecurity (1.5+ years’ experience)
- Experience with common command line syntax
You will need:
You must bring your own laptop and have admin/root access on it and must have a virtualization software (virtualbox / VMWare) pre installed. A customized version of Kali Linux (ova format) containing custom tools, scripts and VPN scripts for the class will be provided to you. Your laptop should have at least 4 GB RAM and 20 GB of free disk space dedicated for the VM.
Course Information
You can download a copy of the course information below.
In addition you will also be provided with a student pack, handouts and cheat-sheets if appropriate.
Your Training Roadmap
Offensive Classes
Hacking training for all levels: new to advanced. Ideal for those preparing for certifications such as CREST CCT (ICE), CREST CCT (ACE), CHECK (CTL), TIGER SST as well as infrastructure / web application penetration testers wishing to add to their existing skill set.
Defensive Classes
Giving you the skills needed to get ahead and secure your business by design. We specialise in application security (both secure coding and building security testing into your software development lifecycle) and cloud security. Build security capability into your teams enabling you to move fast and stay secure.
Testimonials
Very impressed with the lab environment. Course is packed with Information and exciting challenges. Excellent Content and in-depth presentation. Loved the practice timing and walk-through. The extended lab access is helpful to practice after the class."
Delegate, Black Hat USA
GREAT CLASS."
Delegate, Hacking and Securing Cloud - Public Course
I really appreciated being able to take my own time over the material in the lab."
Delegate, Hacking and Securing Cloud - Public Course
It was a full 2 days and quite fast! I'm really keen to know more now."
Delegate, Hacking and Securing Cloud - Public Course
It provided me with the latest Information Security research & development."
Delegate, Black Hat USA
The training was fantastic, I'm sure I'll do the related webinars as well when I have the chance."
Delegate, Hacking and Securing Cloud - Public Course