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OFFENSIVE SECURITY / CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS

Cloud Penetration Testing

Modern cloud environments introduce new identities, services and trust relationships. Assess them before those relationships become attack paths.

Talk to a Security Expert What we test ↓

In the cloud, the network is no longer the main boundary. Identity is. A role, a policy or a key can be the difference between a contained service and access across an entire account.

That shifts what testing needs to look at. The interesting question is usually not whether a host is patched, but what a given identity can do, what it can assume next, and where that chain ends up.

Identity is the new perimeter

Cloud attack paths tend to run through permissions rather than through the network.

  1. USERUser / workloadHuman users, service accounts, CI pipelines
    Authentication
  2. IDENTITYIdentity & accessRoles, policies, trust relationships, assumed permissions
    Privilege boundary
  3. CLOUDCloud servicesConfiguration, exposure, logging, network controls
  4. WORKLOADSWorkloadsCompute, containers, functions and what they run as
  5. DATADataStorage, secrets and the records behind them

Conceptual. Cloud provider testing policies and authorization requirements apply.

// FOCUS AREAS

Focus areas

// CONTEXT

Why cloud environments drift

Cloud permissions are easy to widen and difficult to narrow. A policy is broadened to unblock a deployment, the deployment ships, and nobody revisits the policy because nothing is visibly broken.

Over time the effective permissions of an environment diverge from what anyone intended. Testing measures the gap between the two — what the architecture assumes, and what the configuration actually permits.

// METHODOLOGY

How we approach cloud testing

  1. 01AUTHORIZEConfirm scope and satisfy the cloud provider’s testing requirements.
  2. 02INVENTORYEstablish which accounts, services and identities are in scope.
  3. 03IDENTITYAnalyse permissions, trust relationships and effective access.
  4. 04CONFIGReview service configuration, exposure and network controls.
  5. 05PATHTrace realistic escalation and access paths within scope.
  6. 06REPORTFindings, affected resources and remediation guidance.
// WHO THIS IS FOR

Organizations this typically applies to.

Cloud-native businessesSaaS platformsOrganizations mid-migrationHybrid environmentsMulti-account estatesContainer & serverless workloads

Testing is scoped per engagement. Nothing here implies industry-specific certification or accreditation.

// WHEN THIS APPLIES

When Should Cloud Access Be Tested?

01SITUATIONA migration just completedWorkloads moved and the new identity model has not been tested from the inside.
02SITUATIONPermissions were widened under pressurePolicies were broadened to unblock deployments and never narrowed again.
03SITUATIONMulti-account structure grew organicallySeparation between accounts happened by convention rather than by design.
04SITUATIONA cloud-hosted breach elsewhereA peer was affected and you want to know whether the same path exists here.
// WHAT YOU RECEIVE

A report your team can actually act on.

Exact deliverables and their format are confirmed during scoping.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

What was assessed, what was found and what it means, written to be read by people who will not read the technical detail.

TECHNICAL FINDINGS

Each finding described with enough precision for an engineer to locate and understand it.

EVIDENCE

Reproduction detail and supporting evidence, so findings can be verified rather than taken on trust.

RISK CONTEXT

Severity considered against your environment, not only against a generic scoring table.

REMEDIATION GUIDANCE

Practical direction on addressing each finding, including where a change belongs architecturally.

RETEST / VALIDATION

Verification that addressed findings no longer reproduce, within the agreed retest scope.

// RELATED SERVICES

Adjacent parts of the attack surface.

Network Penetration TestingIdentify weaknesses across authorized network infrastructure, exposed services and segmentation boundaries.VIEW SERVICE →API SecurityAPIs are the connective layer behind modern applications. Test them as seriously as the applications they power.VIEW SERVICE →Red TeamingSimulate realistic adversarial scenarios to evaluate how people, technology and security operations respond to an attack.VIEW SERVICE →Offensive Security OverviewHow the seven testing services fit together across the attack surface.VIEW OVERVIEW →
// FREQUENTLY ASKED

Questions we get asked before an engagement.

Request a Cloud Security Assessment

Tell us how your accounts are structured and where the sensitive workloads sit, and we will scope testing around the identities that reach them.

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