When we look about the cloud environment, we need to understand that the cloud, much like any enterprise,
has also got same vulnerabilities and flaws and even misconfigurations associated with it as a normal
network.
And all intents and purposes, it pretty much is a normal network and we need to treat it as such within
the different cloud environment.
We need to understand that the cloud, much like an enterprise environment, contains the same flaws,
the different misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that you might see in a normal, everyday enterprise
environment.
As such, we still need to do vulnerability scanning and assess whether or not there's different misconfigurations
and the different flaws associated with that perceived environment.
However, there is some differences within the cloud environment versus an enterprise environment that
you may see on premise.
With a cloud environment, we need to be careful about how we scan the different infrastructure in that
we need to understand what is our contract stipulate that we're able to do in that cloud environment?
Am I allowed to scan the environment either legally, ethically or contractually?
And with that, we need to make sure that when we do scan the environment that we're following the policies
and procedures outlined by the environment that we're utilizing.
So before you start scanning and going through the different cloud environment to identify misconfigurations
and flaws, we need to make sure are we allowed to do it within the cloud environment?
We have several different tools to utilize.
The first tool I want to talk about is called Scout Suite.
Now, Scout Suite is an open source auditing tool designed and tailored for cloud security assessments.
Within the Cloud Security tool, we can scan different platforms like AWS, Azure, or even GCP.
It leverages a platform API that automatically scans for cloud assets and identifies potential misconfigurations
security risks, and facilitates an efficient security management infrastructure.
It utilizes custom scans to focus on specific areas and receive detailed, customizable reports highlighting
those vulnerabilities for compliance violations, security flaws, or misconfigurations.
Much like Scout Suite, a different program is called Prowler.
Now, Prowler provides us a framework designed designed to assess the cloud infrastructure for security,
particularly within an AWS environment.
It aligns two key aspects practices and offers a configurable option for programmatic access to via
Amazon API and scans.
Just like a just like Scout suite in AWS, it looks for configuration flaws, security risks, vulnerabilities
in the different flaws associated with the cloud environment.
Then we have something called PACU.
Now, PACU is developed by Rhino Security Labs and introduced for open source AWS Exploitation Framework
in 2018.
It features a modular architecture and emphasizes a penetration testing platform that checks for compliance
issues, security flaws, and vulnerabilities, much like we see in Scout Suite, and it provides a
streamlined approach for documentation.
Uh, PACU is designed really for somebody that's looking specifically for more of the compliance aspect
of AWS, but it does do a little bit more than just that.
It also provides us with a detailed report and documents our attack results within a penetration testing
environment.