Cloud Penetration Testing: A Crucial Strategy to Protect Your Cloud Assets

Quick Summary: Cloud pen testing is an essential process for organizations that rely on cloud services. It enables them to protect their cloud applications, infrastructure, and other assets from potential security breaches by identifying and eliminating vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. In this blog, we will learn more about cloud pentesting, how you can perform it, and the role it plays in enhancing cloud security. Keep reading to know more.

As organizations move to the cloud to leverage scalability and operational efficiency, the need for robust cybersecurity escalates. Cloud penetration testing has emerged as an essential defensive strategy to identify and mitigate cyber security risks.

It helps organizations evaluate their cloud infrastructure and assets with offensive attacks to uncover loopholes that real attackers could exploit. This real-time assessment can help you identify the potential attack vectors and hidden weak spots.

In this blog, we will cover the nuances of cloud pen testing, including its importance, methods, best practices, and more. So, let’s start to understand the role of cloud pentesting in protecting your cloud assets and infrastructure.

Perform AI-Powered Security Testing to Uncover Critical Risks Precisely and Prevent Data Breaches Try It for Free

What is Cloud Penetration Testing?

Cloud pen testing provides a security approach that aims to secure cloud-based assets and resources. It is different from a standard security testing approach with cloud-specific practices and methodologies.

Cloud infrastructures are exposed to more complex vulnerabilities than on-premises infrastructure due to shared resources, multi-tenant architecture, and complications involved in managing data remotely.

Hence, organizations need to address different kinds of vulnerabilities to ensure cloud security and protect sensitive data. Cloud security risks stem from multiple areas of a cloud environment, including applications, storage, and overall infrastructure.

Considering this diversity in risks and its infrastructure, a unique approach is required to discover and address security vulnerabilities.

Cloud penetration testing is the solution to cloud-oriented security challenges. It helps assess cloud assets more effectively to eliminate potential threats in the cloud environment.

However, you should note that pen testing can only be conducted using the shared responsibility model. This means you can pen test the portion of the cloud environment that is under your control and permitted by the cloud provider for security assessments.

How Does Cloud Pen Testing Differ from On-Premises Testing?

Standard penetration testing is designed to evaluate on-premises infrastructure. However, cloud penetration testing requires expertise that is different from the standard approach. So, you need to choose a pen testing approach tailored to meet the specific requirements of testing cloud environments.

For example, cloud penetration testing tools evaluate cloud-specific applications, configurations, APIs, passwords, databases, and other assets. It helps your organization ensure the “shared responsibility” model of the cloud.

As the shared responsibility model requires, you must take your own measures to protect applications and systems based in the cloud environment. Cloud pen testing is an essential step in this process that enables you to boost your security posture.

Is Cloud Penetration Testing Really Important?

Cloud environments are quite different from on-premises environments. Indeed, how data flows from one point to another within this environment is different based on the underlying cloud model adopted by an organization like SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS, as well as the type of cloud infrastructure like public, private, or hybrid cloud.

These differences make cloud security more challenging than traditional on-premises security. Cloud penetration testing is a cloud-specific security testing approach tailored to meet the unique testing requirements of this environment.

The following points describe the importance of penetration testing in evaluating cloud assets and environments.

• Cloud pentesting expands your organization’s visibility into potential business risks. You can combine on-premises testing with cloud pen testing to uncover a wide range of risks. It helps significantly reduce your organization’s attack surface.
• Demonstrate the potential risks of vulnerabilities with exploitation to assess the impact.
• Organizations are required to strictly adhere to many standards and regulations. Cloud pentesting helps ensure compliance with these standards and regulations.
• Cloud testing helps you ensure that you are taking adequate measures to protect your environment and prevent cyber security incidents.
• It helps uncover hidden security misconfigurations and loopholes that allow you to bolster your cloud security posture to prevent costly data breaches.

Areas of Focus in Cloud Pen Testing

There are different areas of your cloud environment that are covered under a typical pen test. They can be divided into three areas: cloud application pen test, cloud infrastructure pen test, and cloud compliance testing. Let’s check all of them in detail below.

Cloud Application Pen Test

Web applications and APIs deployed on the cloud come under the purview of this testing. These APIs and web apps are prone to security misconfigurations and vulnerabilities due to their distributed nature. Pen testing for cloud-based assets helps discover common web app and API vulnerabilities to avoid cyber risks.

Cloud Infrastructure Pen Test

It involves a security assessment of virtual machines, containers, and overall cloud infrastructure. It helps discover a wide range of potential security issues by evaluating VM configurations, access controls, and patch levels.

Compliance Testing

This type of penetration testing helps you discover gaps in your security posture that affect your compliance with industry-specific regulations like PCI DSS and HIPAA. It helps you ensure that your organization’s cloud environment complies with these regulations.

Ensure a Robust Cyber Security Posture by Detecting Vulnerabilities with 98.9% Accuracy Build a Strong Security Shield

What is the Process of Performing Cloud Pen Testing?

Pen testing is a structured process with different steps involved in it. There are three steps in cloud penetration testing as follows.

Evaluation

Evaluation is the first step that involves discovery activities such as identifying potential vulnerability exposures, security gaps, existing cloud SLAs, etc.

Exploitation

In the next step, a pen tester will use the information gathered in the first step to create test cases. The tester will choose a pen testing method and perform simulated attacks to check the response of the cloud environment to the attacks.

It will help determine the efficacy of existing security measures and identify loopholes. Once vulnerabilities are discovered and prioritized, appropriate remediation is performed to fix the issues.

Verification

The pen tester will perform a follow-up assessment to make sure that the mitigation and remediation implemented previously was successful. It helps verify that your security posture aligns with the industry’s security best practices.

Methods Used in Cloud Penetration Testing

A cloud penetration testing methodology defines a specific approach to security testing. This approach helps evaluate the cloud environment and discover a myriad of vulnerabilities and risks. Let’s check out the different types of cloud pen testing.

White Box

In this method, the tester has root privileges or admin-level access to the cloud environment. As a result, the tester has the full knowledge of the cloud environment to be pen tested. It offers a well-informed position to the pentester to evaluate the environment thoroughly and uncover weaknesses more precisely.

Black Box

In black box testing, the tester has no prior knowledge of the target cloud environment and doesn’t have access to it. In this case, the tester will truly think like a real attacker and come up with attack plans to discover weaknesses. It offers a more realistic security assessment.

Gray Box

This is a combination of the two, with the tester having limited knowledge of the target cloud environment. Besides, the tester also has limited access to it. With this limited knowledge and access rights, the tester is capable of evaluating the cloud-based assets from both an external attacker's and an insider’s point of view.

Types of Cloud Penetration Testing Models to Conduct Structured Tests

You need to follow a standard approach to conduct pen testing to effectively assess your cloud environment for potential cybersecurity risks. It will enable you to cover all kinds of risks and eliminate the threats before attackers can exploit them.

The following are the important pen testing methodologies:

PTES

Penetration Testing Execution Standard or PTES defines a set of rules to guide pen testing procedures. You can think of it as a rulebook on how to conduct pen tests and what to consider in the process. PTES states seven stages of pen testing that are: pre-engagement interactions, intelligence gathering, threat modeling, vulnerability analysis, exploitation, post-exploitation, and reporting.

OSSTMM

Open-Source Security Testing Methodology Manual (OSSTMM) is an open-source security testing methodology with a structured approach to the process. As an open-source framework, it is a flexible approach to identifying and mitigating security vulnerabilities.

OWASP

OWASP penetration testing is also an important methodology for testing applications for top critical security risks. It offers lists of the top ten risks and best practices to mitigate those risks.

NIST

NIST is a cybersecurity framework that organizations follow to improve their security posture. It also provides guidelines for conducting security assessments to identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks.

What are Cloud Pen Test Best Practices?

You can improve pen testing for cloud environments by following the best practices given below.

Identify the Assets

Your cloud pentesting is effective when you clearly know which assets are under your control. It is challenging to know in a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud setup. Hence, take an assessment of all your cloud infrastructure to identify which assets need to be tested and how.

Know the Shared Responsibility

Organizations must understand the shared responsibility model to know their security obligations. It is important to understand which security vulnerabilities are their responsibility and which are the cloud providers' responsibilities.

Define Your Scope

Make a clear document of the expectations and goals for testing. This should also include the timeframe for the tests and suggestions on how to conduct the tests.

Scan in Minutes to Secure Your Web Apps and APIs from Cyber Risks Beyond OWASP Start Scanning Now

To Wrap Up

Cloud penetration testing helps you uncover critical security risks and reduce your attack surface by eliminating them on time. However, before you begin the pen testing process, you must spend time understanding the shared responsibility model, the scope of your cloud assets, and how to approach pen testing in the context of your own business.

In this process, an automated pen testing tool is your good companion that evaluates your cloud infrastructure by scanning applications, APIs, microservices, and other assets. Such a tool simulates real-world attacks and discovers vulnerabilities. You can combine both manual and automated pentesting to perform comprehensive security assessments and secure your cloud infrastructure.