Cloud platforms are flexible and powerful—but that flexibility introduces configuration and identity complexity attackers love. A robust Cloud Security Assessment & Penetration Test combines architecture review, configuration analysis, and offensive validation to reveal real attack paths, not theoretical risks.

This guide outlines a practical, engineering-level approach for validating cloud security across AWS, Azure, and GCP: how assessments are conducted, common exploitable patterns, telemetry and detection requirements, and actionable remediation steps you can apply immediately.

Threat Modelling: Start with What Matters

• Crown jewels: sensitive buckets, databases, secrets, service accounts.
• Trust boundaries: cross-account roles, VPC peering, service principals, federations.
• User population: admin vs. developer identities, CI/CD bots, third-party access.
• Attack surface: public endpoints, exposed APIs, temporary credentials.

Map adversary goals (data theft, service disruption, crypto-mining, privilege escalation) to likely TTPs. Use that map to prioritize accounts, regions, and services for assessment.

Technical Methodology — What We Actually Run

1. Discovery & Inventory: enumerate accounts/projects/subscriptions, roles, service principals, and public resources; harvest metadata endpoints and public storage.
2. Configuration & Policy Review: analyze IAM policies, trust policies, ACLs, SCPs; compare against CIS and Well-Architected.
3. Identity Abuse & Privilege Escalation: test for overly permissive roles, role chaining, stale keys, federation misconfigurations, and cross-account assumptions.
4. Service Misconfiguration Exploits: publicly accessible storage, serverless misconfigs, insecure registries, metadata/SSRF paths, CI secret exposure.
5. Lateral Movement & Data Access: pivot with escalated privileges to access DBs, secrets, internal dashboards; simulate safe exfiltration for proof.
6. Detection & Response Validation: exercise noisy and stealthy behaviors to evaluate logging, alerting, and SOC playbooks.
7. Reporting & Hardening: exploit reproductions, affected resources, prioritized fixes, and detection engineering tactics.

All steps run under strict Rules of Engagement—no destructive tests and no data access beyond agreed scope.

Common Findings (and How to Fix Them)

1) Overprivileged Roles / Role Chaining

Issue: broad permissions or risky trust relationships enable escalation. Fix: least privilege, role-based access, IAM conditions (e.g., tags, source IPs), short-lived credentials.

2) Exposed Storage

Issue: public buckets/blobs leak data. Fix: block public access, enforce encryption, automate guardrails via IaC policy checks.

3) Stale or Leaked Credentials in CI

Issue: long-lived keys in pipelines/repos enable lateral movement. Fix: rotate keys, adopt short-lived tokens, add secrets scanning in CI/CD.

4) Insufficient Telemetry

Issue: missing identity, API, or admin action logs. Fix: enable/centralize CloudTrail/Azure Monitor/GCP Audit Logs; forward to SIEM with retention & normalization.

5) Weak Network/Service Controls

Issue: permissive security groups or public endpoints for internal services. Fix: least-privilege ACLs, private endpoints, internal load balancers.

Detection Engineering: What You Need to Catch Real Attacks

• Identity events: role assumption, policy changes, key creation, token exchanges.
• Data access: object GETs on sensitive stores; unusual read patterns/IPs.
• Privilege changes: IAM policy attachments, new admin roles.
• Anomalies: API surges, unusual regions, new service principal usage.

Correlate identity + data + network signals in your SIEM. Enrich events (principal, source IP, region, resource tags) to make detections precise and actionable.

Integrating Findings into DevSecOps

• Add IaC security gates (terraform plan checks, policy as code) to block insecure configs pre-deploy.
• Automate remediation for common issues (public access blocks, encryption required).
• Create security tests that assert no overly permissive IAM bindings.
• Run targeted regression pentests after major infra changes.

See also: DevSecOps and Penetration Testing for complementary controls.

Case Example: From Exposure to Resilience

During a hybrid-cloud assessment, testers chained: exposed CI artifact storage → leaked service account token → cross-project role assumption → access to production secrets. Remediation included rotating keys, enforcing token lifetimes, blocking public artifacts, and adding detections for artifact access and role assumptions. Post-retest, privilege escalation risk dropped and identity telemetry coverage increased 4×.

Conclusion & Next Steps

Cloud assessments and pentests are about proving assumptions. They reveal realistic attack paths through identity, configuration, and telemetry gaps—and convert findings into durable controls, automated prevention, and tuned detections.