Simulate the compromise of cloud assets to assess your organisation’s ability to detect, contain, and mitigate cloud-based threats.
Testing Resilience in Cloud Environments
Service Overview
Cloud environments introduce unique attack paths that differ from traditional on-premise infrastructure. Adversaries leverage identity-based attacks, misconfigured resources, insecure APIs, and over-permissioned accounts to move laterally and escalate privileges within cloud platforms.
SilentGrid’s Cloud Assumed Breach simulates these post-compromise scenarios, starting from the premise that an adversary has already gained initial cloud access. The objective is to test your detection, response, and mitigation capabilities against internal cloud threats and identity-based compromises.
This service reflects real-world cloud attack techniques used by adversaries to exploit AWS, Azure, GCP, and multi-cloud environments.
Why Cloud Assumed Breach is Critical
Evolving Cloud Threat Landscape
- Identity is the New Perimeter – Compromising a single cloud identity can lead to privilege escalation, data breaches, and resource manipulation.
- Cloud Misconfigurations – A misconfigured IAM role, storage bucket, or API gateway can inadvertently expose critical assets.
- Over-Permissioned Accounts – Excessive privileges allow attackers to move laterally across cloud environments.
While cloud providers offer robust security features, misconfigurations, poor visibility, and excessive trust relationships remain key entry points for attackers.
SilentGrid’s Approach to Cloud Assumed Breach
SilentGrid leverages real-world adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) specific to cloud environments. We simulate attackers operating within compromised cloud accounts to evaluate your detection, containment, and remediation workflows.
Our Methodology
-
Establishing Initial Foothold
- Simulate initial cloud compromise scenarios such as:
- Compromised access keys, service tokens, or OAuth tokens.
- Insider threat with existing cloud credentials.
- Compromised developer accounts or stolen API keys.
-
Privilege Escalation and Lateral Movement
- Abuse IAM policies, trust relationships, and role assumption paths.
- Identify over-permissioned roles, unprotected admin accounts, or misconfigured service identities.
- Exploit serverless functions (Lambdas), containers, and cloud Kubernetes clusters for lateral movement.
-
Resource Discovery and Data Exfiltration
- Enumerate storage buckets (S3, Blob), databases, and critical assets.
- Test for publicly exposed resources and data leaks.
- Simulate data exfiltration paths while bypassing logging and monitoring tools.
-
Persistence Testing
- Simulate implanting persistence by creating rogue IAM roles, long-lived tokens, and shadow infrastructure.
- Evaluate the visibility of persistence techniques in your cloud monitoring solutions (e.g., AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor, and GCP Logging).
-
Incident Response Validation
- Trigger alerts through controlled exploitation to test SOC and IR response workflows.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of your SIEM, CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), and EDR tools for detecting cloud-native attacks.
Key Attack Scenarios Simulated
- Cloud Credential Harvesting – Testing for credential leaks, unprotected environment variables, and insecure repositories.
- Privilege Escalation via Misconfigured IAM – Simulating abuse of role chaining, misconfigured trust policies, and role assumption paths.
- Cloud Lateral Movement – Exploiting cloud-native services, containers, and serverless functions for lateral movement.
- Data Breaches and Exfiltration – Testing for open storage buckets, misconfigured databases, and data exfiltration paths to external environments.
- Exploitation of Serverless and APIs – Targeting Lambda functions, API gateways, and microservices to pivot further within the cloud.
Deliverables and Reporting
SilentGrid’s Cloud Assumed Breach engagements provide actionable insights into cloud security risks, identity-based attack paths, and remediation strategies.
You will receive:
- Attack Path Documentation – A detailed breakdown of the attack paths, privilege escalation techniques, and exploited misconfigurations.
- Cloud IAM Analysis – Identifying over-permissioned accounts, misaligned roles, and unnecessary cloud privileges.
- Persistence Techniques – Demonstrations of how adversaries establish long-term access within your cloud environment.
- Incident Response Recommendations – Strategic and tactical recommendations to improve cloud logging, monitoring, and detection rules.
- Executive Summary – A high-level overview for leadership, outlining business risks and strategic priorities for cloud security enhancement.
Benefits of Cloud Assumed Breach
-
Expose Cloud-Specific Attack Paths
Test for misconfigurations, unprotected APIs, and privilege escalation paths unique to cloud environments.
-
Validate Cloud Security Posture
Assess how well your cloud security configurations defend against identity-based threats and internal compromise scenarios.
-
Enhance Incident Response
Improve your cloud SOC workflows, alerting pipelines, and incident containment strategies by simulating real-world breaches.
-
Continuous Improvement
Receive iterative feedback and re-testing to ensure remediated misconfigurations and cloud vulnerabilities are fully addressed.
Is Cloud Assumed Breach Right for You?
Cloud Assumed Breach is ideal for organisations that:
- Operate heavily in AWS, Azure, GCP, or multi-cloud environments.
- Need to test the effectiveness of cloud-native security controls.
- Want to validate identity and access management (IAM) security across cloud platforms.
- Seek to simulate post-compromise scenarios to evaluate lateral movement and data exfiltration risks.
Get Started with Cloud Assumed Breach Testing
SilentGrid’s cloud-focused adversary simulations expose vulnerabilities before real attackers do.
Contact Us to schedule a Cloud Assumed Breach Engagement and enhance your cloud security posture.