These days, companies are far more likely to get hacked because of a simple human mistake than a complex technical exploit. The problem is that standard security tests were designed for old-school, on-premises servers, so they aren’t built to catch cloud-specific attack paths that are often introduced by human decisions. What you need is a penetration testing service: where friendly hackers intentionally try to exploit these exact cloud configuration errors to see where your system is vulnerable, before malicious attackers use them against you.
How is cloud penetration testing different from traditional network testing?
Traditional network testing probes the weak points of infrastructure under your direct control:
- physical servers
- routers
- firewalls
- internal networks
It’s mainly designed to see how far someone can get past your perimeter defenses.
In contrast, cloud testing zeroes in on user identities and the configuration governing their permissions, along with APIs (the interfaces that let cloud services communicate with each other). Instead of testing whether an attacker can cross your network perimeter, a penetration testing service will examine whether the credentials you’ve issued provide too much access. That includes checking whether those credentials can reach or manipulate your:
- IAM policies
- cloud storage
- serverless functions
- container environments
Why is it important to test the cloud differently from a traditional network?
Because you can’t secure the cloud like it’s a physical building with a guard at the gate. In the cloud, user accounts and access settings ARE the new perimeter: and keeping them safe is entirely your responsibility, not your cloud provider’s.
Your cloud provider (may it be Amazon, Microsoft, or Google) is responsible for keeping the actual physical data centers safe, but you have to secure everything inside your account, including your user passwords and settings. In the cloud, a stolen password or an over-permissive user permission is far more dangerous than a physical server being exposed, because anyone can log in from anywhere via code (APIs) or remote logins.
What does cloud penetration testing cover?
A cloud penetration testing service is an ethical hack customized to your cloud environment to determine if an attacker could steal your most important data or shut down your operations.
An ethical hacker will actively probe your setup for openings an attacker could exploit, such as storage drives that may be publicly exposed and leaks in your APIs. They will also check if users with low privileges can find a way to boost their own access to administrative levels and then steal sensitive data and/or shut down critical services. The test will specifically target cloud components like containers (self-contained packages used to run applications), serverless (code that runs on demand without you managing the underlying servers), and identity federation (how single-sign-on accounts talk to each other), among other parts of your cloud setup.
How secure is your cloud environment?
CA can find out. Talk to our team about cloud penetration testing services aimed at the weak points specific to your configuration.
