If your organisation uses cloud services to host critical assets such as web applications or sensitive data, cloud security assessments are a core requirement of a robust security posture.
Cloud Penetration Testing
Uncover common pitfalls in your cloud infrastructure with JUMPSEC cloud penetration testing, we provide custom assessments to protect your cloud environment.
Overview
The ever-increasing reliance upon cloud systems means the risks may be nuanced, but the implications are the same.
What is Cloud Penetration Testing?
Cloud penetration testing is an attack simulation used to identify common misconfigurations in cloud estates, and vulnerabilities in the assets hosted within them.
JUMPSEC is a trusted cloud security vendor, with experience delivering engagements in all major cloud providers like Amazon’s AWS, Google’s Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. The main goal of a cloud penetration test is to assess the effectiveness of security controls and identify, safely exploit and help to remediate vulnerabilities in hosted assets before they are compromised by malicious adversaries.
JUMPSEC cloud security consultants evaluate your security posture by pinpointing issues and vulnerabilities within your estate and assets, whether it’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS).
This encompasses identifying dangerous misconfigurations, exposed cloud storage, overly privileged accounts, missing best practices and irregular deployments to avert security threats. Our actionable recommendations for enhancement are rooted in established cloud methodologies and CIS benchmarks.
What are the benefits of cloud penetration testing?
By performing cloud penetration testing, you engage seasoned cloud consultants to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your cloud estate, which is increasingly becoming a growing portion of organisations overall security posture.
Securing your cloud estate helps you avoid costly data breaches and protect sensitive information. The assessment is aimed at iImproving your technical assurance, and an providing you with an understanding of the attack surface your systems are exposed to. Benefits include:
Problems with Cloud Security
All the major benefits of cloud computing – improved IT efficiency, flexibility and scalability – come with a major challenge: security. According to the 2022 Cloud Security Report, misconfiguration of the cloud platform remains the biggest security risk. This is followed by insecure interfaces, exfiltration of sensitive data and unauthorised access, compliance concerns tied with concerns about accidental exposure of credentials.
Our cloud security assessments identify the biggest and most common threats to your cloud environment including:
Types of Cloud Penetration Testing
If you're in need of an advanced cloud penetration test using traditional internal and external assessment methods, or a cloud configuration review to align with best practices, our team of experts is here to support you.
We employ proven methodologies and industry best practice to thoroughly evaluate your environments and compare them against CIS benchmarks. While prior authorisation is no longer required for cloud pen testing, testers must adhere to the rules of engagement set by cloud providers.
Our cloud security testing specialists are adept at navigating these regulations and can conduct testing on various platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, EntraID, Microsoft 365, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Enumeration of external attack surface
Discover the various access points to the environment, including O365, Web Applications, Storage Blobs, S3 Buckets, SQL/RDS Databases, Azure Automation APIs, AWS APIs, Remote Desktops, VPNs, and more.
Virtual Machines / EC2
Through testing, we guarantee the security of these virtual machines with Network Security Groups (NSGs – like firewalls) and encrypt their data at rest.
We conduct audits to identify missing patches and their impacts, especially for publicly accessible virtual machines, where we closely examine their external interfaces.
Storage and Databases
Review of the data hygiene in a cloud estate often discovers common bad practices, such as sensitive data being stored in publicly-facing or unrestricted cloud storage.
We perform rigorous discovery exercises to uncover these, and ensure they are restricted to only those who need access. We also identify if the encryption standards protecting your databases are suitably secure.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure in the cloud can be vulnerable to many of the same security concerns that are identified during the course of a standard internal penetration test.
Whether it is insufficient patching that could lead to remote code execution on a virtual machine or the use of default credentials that allow access to sensitive services.
Network Segmentation or ACLs
A number of access control rules will be tested with the goal of identifying if they sufficiently restrict access to sensitive components or applications.
Furthermore, we perform testing to ensure key infrastructure is correctly isolated and the risk to your business is reduced in the event of a cloud asset compromise.
Containers
The use of cloud-based container services such as Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) or Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) are becoming more prevalent.
Containers often present a large attack surface due to the complicated nature of container implementation. JUMPSEC reviews the configuration of the service, as well as common misconfigurations such as the permissions of users with access to the service in order to identify any privilege escalation attack vectors.
Why choose Jumpsec for cloud penetration testing?
One of highest accredited UK Penetration Testing Companies
Technical excellence in offensive security
A deep understanding of how attackers operate
Actionable in-depth analysis you can trust
Outstanding post test care to effectively mitigate risk
Resources

Red Teaming in the Cloud: A Shift in Perspective
Cloud adoption is exploding, and rightfully so. Businesses are seeing the value of improved agility and efficiency when leveraging public cloud, resulting in 60% of all corporate data globally being stored in the cloud in 2022.
JUMPSEC A red teamer’s forecast – Cloudy with a chance of hacks
Our adversarial simulation team will outline how attackers exploit cloud infrastructure and offer strategies to counter their efforts.


How Cloud Migration is Affecting AppSec – A Red Teamer’s Perspective
I’ve recently spoken at several conferences about the changes that are underway within red teaming as a result of cloud migration.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Cloud computing?
Cloud computing is the delivery of IT resources over the internet using the pay-as-you-go principle. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centres and servers, we can access a variety of technology services, including computing power, storage, and databases. Many popular cloud computing providers, such as AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle, are used daily for workloads.
As the popularity of cloud services increases, attackers are focusing on cloud vulnerabilities. They are using sustained attacks against managed cloud service providers and their customers. This is why it is essential for companies using cloud technologies to ensure their systems are secure.
How Does Cloud Penetration Testing Differ from Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing is the process of performing offensive security tests on a system, service, or network to find security weaknesses in it. So, when it comes to cloud penetration testing, it is just performing a simulated attack on your cloud services to test their security.
How often should you test a cloud environment?
Cloud environments are constantly changing, with new features being released, old ones removed, names changed, and more. In addition, most organisations we work with are in the process of migrating more business-critical assets to the cloud every day. As such, we believe a regular review of your cloud estate and assets should be conducted to ensure critical security concerns are not being introduced. On average, this would happen 1-2 times per year.
Will my business be disrupted during this test?
Your business will not be disrupted during testing. JUMPSEC consultants are well versed in assessing security standards whilst avoiding any fallout of their testing. Any actions that could cause even theoretical business impact will be discussed with your IT and Security teams for approval prior to being conducted.
How long does a test take?
Ultimately, this depends on the type of testing that you seek. The shortest assessments are ‘baseline’ configuration reviews in which your estate is assessed against industry standard best practice guidelines, like CIS Benchmarks. The longest assessments would be full end-to-end covert assessment of your people, cloud assets and processes in a cloud red team engagement. JUMPSEC tailor the approach taken to address the individual goals, concerns and budget of our clients.
Do you recommend other tests alongside cloud pen testing?
The more ‘sophisticated’ an engagement the wider the testing scope is, i.e a cloud red team will assess cloud-hosted apps, staff passwords, and much more. Maybe that is the angle to take here? Additionally, the first thing that was ever really moved up into the cloud were webapps and that is still probably the most common use-case, so a separate web app pentest is often a good idea.