Cloud Security Penetration Testing
Misconfigurations Don't Show Up on Compliance Checklists. Attackers Find Them Anyway.
Cloud environments introduce an entirely different class of security risk — one that compliance frameworks were not designed to catch and that on-premises security expertise does not transfer to directly. Misconfigured IAM roles, exposed storage buckets, leaked credentials in CI/CD pipelines, overpermissioned service accounts, and lateral movement paths through cloud-native services are the conditions real-world attackers consistently exploit.
Evaluris assesses your cloud posture from an attacker's perspective across AWS and Azure — identifying every exploitable misconfiguration chain, privilege escalation path, and cross-account compromise scenario that represents real business risk.
The Cloud Security Gap
Most organizations believe their cloud environment is secure because they passed a compliance audit or because their cloud provider marks the shared responsibility model as addressed. Neither of those things means your configuration is secure.
The shared responsibility model means the cloud provider secures the infrastructure. You are responsible for everything you configure on top of it — and the default configurations of most cloud services are permissive, not restrictive. Organizations that migrated to the cloud quickly, organizations that have grown their cloud footprint organically, and organizations where developers have direct cloud access almost always have exploitable misconfigurations that were never intentionally introduced and have never been tested.
The most common initial attack vector in cloud breaches is not a zero-day exploit. It is a misconfigured permission, an exposed API key, or a forgotten public storage bucket.
Methodology
Cloud Asset Discovery & Enumeration
Full inventory of cloud assets across the engagement scope: compute instances, storage buckets, databases, serverless functions, container registries, API gateways, IAM users, roles, and policies. Identification of internet-exposed resources and public access configurations.
IAM & Permission Analysis
Policy document analysis for overpermissioned roles, privilege escalation paths via IAM, assume-role chain analysis, cross-account access configurations, service control policy gaps, and permission boundary weaknesses.
Storage & Data Exposure Testing
S3 bucket (AWS) and Blob storage (Azure) public access testing, pre-signed URL abuse, bucket policy misconfiguration, and lifecycle policy analysis for sensitive data exposure.
Credential & Secrets Discovery
CI/CD pipeline secret scanning, environment variable exposure in serverless functions, EC2 instance metadata service (IMDSv1) abuse, hardcoded credentials in container images, and exposed API keys in source repositories.
Lateral Movement & Privilege Escalation
IAM privilege escalation chains, EC2 role abuse, Lambda function abuse, container escape paths, cross-service lateral movement, and persistence mechanism identification.
Network & Perimeter Configuration
Security group misconfiguration, public subnet exposure, VPC peering trust abuse, load balancer rule analysis, and WAF bypass testing.
What We Test
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments
- Microsoft Azure environments
- IAM configurations, roles, and policies
- Storage services (S3, Azure Blob, EFS, Azure Files)
- Serverless functions (Lambda, Azure Functions)
- Container services (ECS, EKS, AKS, ACR, ECR)
- CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, CodePipeline)
- API Gateway and microservice architectures
- Network configuration (VPCs, security groups, NACLs, NSGs)
- Entra ID (Azure AD) and AWS IAM Identity Center
Compliance Alignment
| Framework | Requirement |
|---|---|
| ISO 27001:2022 | A.8.8 — technical vulnerability management; A.5.23 — information security for cloud services |
| PCI DSS v4.0.1 | Cloud-hosted cardholder data environment testing requirements |
| DORA Art. 25 | ICT infrastructure testing including cloud environments |
| CSA Cloud Controls Matrix | Technical security assessment aligned to CCM domains |
| NIS2 Art. 21 | Cloud infrastructure security and resilience obligations |
| CBUAE / SAMA | Cloud-hosted financial infrastructure included in VAPT scope |
Deliverables
- Cloud Asset Inventory — complete map of discovered resources, exposure points, and access configurations
- IAM Attack Path Report — privilege escalation chains and lateral movement paths documented visually
- Executive Summary — risk-rated findings for cloud security posture
- Technical Report — full exploitation evidence, CVSS scoring, and cloud-native remediation guidance
- Terraform / IaC Remediation Notes — fix recommendations expressed in infrastructure-as-code terms where applicable
- Retest Window — post-remediation verification
Ready to scope this engagement?
Tell us about your environment, regulatory drivers, and timeline. We will align methodology, scope, and evidence requirements before testing begins.