Ravindra BagaleCourses & study guides

17. Why Learn All This Before Kali Linux?

17.6 From S3, RDS and IAM to Cloud Misconfigurations

Cloud madhe bahutek breaches "hacking" ne nahi tar chukichya settings ne hotat. Part 7 madhe tumhi pratyek setting swatah kela – tyamule chuk kuthe hote te tumhala mahit aahe.

You learnt (Part 7 and 8) Misconfiguration attackers look for Correct setting
Block Public Access, bucket policy Public or listable buckets, Principal: "*" with write access BPA ON, no public Allow
Presigned URLs Very long expiry, URLs in logs Short expiry, HTTPS
IAM role vs access keys Access keys in code, GitHub or ~/.aws/credentials Roles, least privilege, no long-term keys
IMDSv2 SSRF to 169.254.169.254 stealing role credentials IMDSv2 required, hop limit 1
RDS public access, db-sg Database reachable on 3306 from the internet Private RDS, SG-to-SG rule
RDS snapshots Public snapshots Private, encrypted snapshots
Security groups 0.0.0.0/0 on 22 or 3306 Specific sources only

Why this matters for security

In the cloud security chapter you will use AWS tools (IAM Access Analyzer, AWS Config, GuardDuty, CloudTrail) that detect exactly these misconfigurations. Each alert will make sense instantly, because you created the resource by hand and know what "public", "role" and "security group" really mean.

Ravindra Bagale's Tip

Students think hacking the cloud needs some big exploit. Most of the time, one wrong checkbox or one access key that ended up on GitHub is enough. That's why you should read the checklists in Chapters 14 and 15 again and again – cloud security is a matter of discipline.

Practice task

For your AWS account, list every S3 bucket and check its Block Public Access status, list every security group rule that allows 0.0.0.0/0, and search your laptop and projects for files named credentials or containing AKIA.