Conducting Cloud Penetration Testing

When to Use

• When performing authorized security assessments of cloud environments before production deployment
• When validating cloud security controls after a major architectural change or migration
• When compliance requirements mandate annual penetration testing of cloud infrastructure
• When testing incident response readiness by simulating realistic cloud-based attack scenarios
• When assessing lateral movement risk across multi-account or multi-cloud environments

Do not use for unauthorized testing against cloud accounts, for testing cloud provider infrastructure itself (covered by the shared responsibility model), or for DDoS simulation without explicit cloud provider approval.

Prerequisites

• Written authorization from the cloud account owner and scope definition document
• AWS, Azure, or GCP penetration testing policy acknowledgment (AWS no longer requires pre-approval for most services)
• Isolated testing account or explicitly scoped production account with breakglass procedures
• Cloud-specific offensive tooling installed: Pacu (AWS), ScoutSuite, Prowler, CloudFox
• MITRE ATT&CK Cloud matrix for finding classification