Increased expansion of the cloud computing industry brings tremendous value to business efficacy by supporting existing technologies and enabling seamless service automation. The capacity to shift information assets, datasets, and IT infrastructure to the cloud is quite a rewarding relief for most organizations. There is more operational flexibility enhanced by cloud-based systems, allowing businesses to upscale their storage and computing needs.
However, the rise of cloud services consequently stretches the scope of potential cyber-related threats. As a result, the industry demands a functional approach to detect prevailing vulnerabilities in cloud environments. This is the background upon which cloud penetration testing is built.
Read on for a highlight of the elements defining cloud penetration testing.
What is Cloud Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing, also known as ethical hacking or pen testing, is an authorized simulation of a cyber attack targeted at a computer system to determine its strengths and vulnerabilities. A cloud pen test aims to exploit potential loopholes of every attack surface of a cloud system for enhanced security posture.
The basic proposition of cloud penetration is to study and copy the psychology, tactics, and activities of a cyber attacker as an analysis of the hackability of cloud infrastructure. This strategy is deployed by individuals or teams of cybersecurity experts best known as pen testers or ethical hackers.
Penetration tests are a proactive measure of cybersecurity that help organizations identify and fix vulnerabilities as they occur.
The Value of Cloud Penetration Testing
Generally, a penetration test puts an organization’s security policies under scrutiny, rendering an informed outlook of whether such policies are realistically effective.
As a crucial component of cloud security, pen tests validate a secure environment through the following elements.
• The Human Touch of Vulnerability Assessment
A cloud security pen goes beyond the automated procedures of assessing vulnerabilities. The concept introduces human expertise through penetration testers who can think, explore, and act like cyber attackers. Automated system scanners are devoid of this capacity.
Essentially, a penetration tester helps you identify existing weaknesses in your systems, web applications, and networks through which your cloud can be compromised.
• Shared Responsibility for Cloud Security
Cloud computing applies the shared responsibility security model, especially where cloud service providers are involved. The model suggests that the business and the outsourced cloud provider bear a fair share of the organization’s security burden.
This means that the cloud service provider is independently responsible for securing all the outsourced services as per its service agreement with your business.
On the other hand, once cloud providers have supplied the necessary cloud services, you are responsible for all the services you launch on the cloud.
In this regard, penetration testing helps in ensuring that this shared responsibility is equally fulfilled by both parties.
• Remediation Verification
Cloud and web application penetration is a continuous process. Where vulnerabilities are detected and the weaknesses patched up, a pen test verifies whether remediation measures were successfully deployed. Additionally, a pen tester provides specialist advice on how the identified loopholes can be remediated for progressive cloud security.
Types of Cloud Penetration Testing
The three different types of cloud pen testing include; white box, black box, and grey box testing.
• White Box Penetration Testing
In white pen testing, ethical hackers are provided with full information about the target system, including system documentation and source codes. White box pen testers are required to sift through the issued datasets and information to identify existing vulnerabilities.
The advantage of white box testing is that the focus is on the internal and external weaknesses of a cloud system, providing the best actionable guide to remediation.
• Black Box Penetration Testing
A black box penetration test is designed to run an authorized simulation of an attack by an external pen tester. This means that the pen tester has no prior knowledge or information about the target cloud environment. Black box testing aims to examine the vulnerabilities of a system exploited externally.
Black box penetration testers must be acquainted with the dynamics of a network similar to the target system.
Black box tests are the fastest to run with the testing speed largely dependent on the pen tester’s skills. However, where the black box test runs unsuccessfully, the organization’s vulnerabilities remain unexploited.
• Gray Box Testing
Gray box pen tests provide a mix of black box and white box testing strategies. A gray box pen tester is an external user provided with knowledge and internal access to the target system. The simulation of a gray box test is designed to mimic an external attacker with limited access to the system.
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