Cloud Security Is an Identity Problem

Identity is the new perimeter, and 80% of cloud breaches start with a compromised identity

What Makes Cloud Testing Different

A traditional pentest treats the network as the perimeter. In cloud, the perimeter is your identity model: who can assume which role, who can pass which permission set, which workload can reach which control plane. Real-world cloud breaches like Capital One, Sisense, and Snowflake-customer incidents all started with credential exposure, then chained identity privilege to data exfiltration. We test that chain end-to-end.

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, including multi-cloud and hybrid

Mapped to MITRE ATT&CK for Cloud and CIS Cloud Benchmarks

External attacker simulation, assumed-breach, and config-review modes

Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE) and managed-container security

Serverless: Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run, event-driven trust chains

CI/CD pipeline security: GitHub Actions, GitLab, AWS CodePipeline, Azure DevOps

Coverage by Cloud Provider

Deep, provider-specific tradecraft

AWS

IAM policy enumeration, AssumeRole chain analysis, S3 misconfiguration, SSRF-to-IMDS pivots, Lambda persistence, EventBridge abuse, GuardDuty evasion, and Organizations / Control Tower hardening. Covers 250+ AWS services.

Azure & Entra ID

Entra ID / Azure AD enumeration, Conditional Access bypass, OAuth-app phishing, Service Principal abuse, Managed Identity pivoting, Azure Storage and Key Vault attacks, and Microsoft Graph API abuse for tenant-wide reconnaissance.

Google Cloud (GCP)

Service-account impersonation chains, IAM Workload Identity abuse, BigQuery and Cloud Storage exfiltration, Cloud Functions and Cloud Run persistence, and GKE Workload Identity / metadata-server attacks.

Kubernetes

Pod-escape, RBAC misconfiguration, service-account token abuse, etcd exposure, admission-controller bypass, and supply-chain attacks via Helm and operator images. Aligned to CIS Kubernetes Benchmark and NSA/CISA Kubernetes Hardening Guide.

Serverless & Event-Driven

Lambda / Azure Functions / Cloud Functions: injection through event sources, IAM-role over-privilege, function-URL exposure, and cross-account event abuse. Includes API Gateway, EventBridge, and Pub/Sub trust-chain analysis.

CI/CD & Supply Chain

GitHub Actions OIDC misconfiguration, self-hosted runner abuse, secrets-in-logs, Terraform-state exposure, container-image supply chain, and SLSA-aligned build-system review.

Assessment Modes

Pick the perspective that answers the question your leadership is asking

External Attacker

Black-box external perspective: what can an internet-based attacker do without prior access? Includes exposure-mapping, OSINT, leaked-credential analysis, and exploitation of internet-facing services.

Assumed Breach

We start with a low-privilege identity (compromised developer key, stolen CI runner token, phished console session) and demonstrate how far we can escalate. Best simulation of real-world cloud breaches.

Configuration Review

Read-only IAM-policy and resource-config audit against CIS Benchmarks, MITRE ATT&CK, and provider best practice. Fastest and cheapest mode, useful as a baseline before deeper testing.

Methodology

Repeatable, evidence-rich, and aligned to industry standards

Inventory & Threat Model

Tagged-resource inventory, account/subscription topology, identity-trust graph. We need to know what we're attacking before we attack it.

External Recon

Internet-facing exposure mapping, leaked-credential and public-bucket searches, and DNS/cert-transparency reconnaissance of your cloud estate.

Identity Path Analysis

Graph-based analysis of every privilege-escalation and lateral-movement path in your IAM model. This is the highest-value finding category in cloud testing.

Exploitation

Demonstrate the attack chains that matter: credential theft, privilege escalation, lateral movement across accounts, data exfiltration, and persistence. Every step is logged for blue-team correlation.

Detection Validation

We tell you which actions GuardDuty, Defender for Cloud, and Security Command Center detected, and which they missed. Detection gaps come with recommended rules.

Report & Hardening Plan

CVSS-scored findings, IAM-graph visualizations, prioritized remediation plan, and infrastructure-as-code snippets for the highest-impact fixes.

Multi-Cloud Certified Operators

AWS Security Specialty, Azure Security Engineer Associate, Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer, CKS (Certified Kubernetes Security). Plus offensive certs: OSCP, OSEP, and cloud-specific offensive training.

Identity-First Methodology

We build an attack graph of your identity model and show you every escalation path, including the ones we never walked during the engagement.

Provider Policy-Compliant

Engagements are conducted within AWS, Azure, and GCP customer-testing policies (no formal notification required for most services). We file pre-test forms where the provider still requires them.

IaC-Ready Remediation

High-impact fixes are delivered as Terraform / CloudFormation / Bicep snippets your engineers can drop into a PR. No "go figure out the JSON" findings.

Cloud Pentest FAQ

AWS no longer requires pre-authorization for most services (since 2019). Azure does not require notification. GCP allows customer testing under its acceptable-use policy. Some specific services (Route 53, certain DNS testing, sustained-load testing on EC2) still need notification, and we handle those filings for you.

Configuration-review and identity-path analysis are 100% read-only. Active exploitation is scoped against staging where possible; against production we use rate-limited, evidence-only techniques and exclude destructive actions (no real data exfiltration, no service disruption).

CSPMs find misconfigurations against a checklist. We chain misconfigurations together into actual attack paths and demonstrate exploitation. A CSPM might tell you a Lambda has overly-broad IAM; we'll tell you that lambda can reach your customer database and show you the path. They're complementary, and many of our clients run both.

Single-cloud engagements run 2–4 weeks. Multi-cloud, complex Kubernetes estates, or organization-wide AWS Control Tower environments can run 4–8 weeks. Configuration-review-only engagements compress to 5–10 business days.

Yes. Kubernetes can be scoped as a standalone engagement covering control-plane security, RBAC, network policy, pod security, supply-chain (image signing, admission controllers), and integration with the underlying cloud IAM. Particularly valuable before SOC 2 or HIPAA audits of containerized workloads.