Cloud Security Assessment

Why Generic Penetration Testing Misses Cloud Risk

Cloud breaches almost never follow the on-premises playbook. There is no perimeter to breach; there is an over-permissive IAM role, a public storage bucket, a Lambda execution role with iam:PassRole *, or a Kubernetes service account that can list secrets cluster-wide. Generic pen testing tools surface a fraction of these because they don't understand the provider control plane.

A CDSEC cloud assessment combines configuration audit against the relevant CIS Benchmark (AWS Foundations, Azure Foundations, or GCP Foundations) with an active exploitation phase that chains misconfigurations into realistic privilege-escalation paths. We use the same techniques documented by Rhino Security Labs (Pacu), Microsoft's offensive teams, and the Cloud Security Alliance's research into provider-specific attack patterns.

What We Test Per Provider

Methodology

1. Read-only enumeration. We start with a least-privilege audit role and enumerate the estate against the relevant CIS Benchmark. Findings here cover the long tail of misconfiguration debt.
2. Attack path mapping. We build the IAM graph and identify privilege-escalation paths — service accounts that can impersonate others, roles with iam:PassRole *, storage objects with sensitive content, key policies that trust untrusted principals.
3. Authenticated exploitation. With permission, we exercise the highest-impact paths end-to-end and confirm what an attacker who reaches that initial principal can achieve. This is where ad-hoc cloud reviews fall short — discovering a finding is one thing, proving its business impact is another.
4. Detection validation. We test whether your CloudTrail / Azure Activity Log / GCP Audit Log telemetry actually surfaces the attack actions to your SIEM, and whether your SOC playbooks trigger on the expected event types.
5. IaC remediation. Where you operate via Terraform, CloudFormation or Bicep, we propose remediations as code-diffs rather than console screenshots — same fix, lower friction.

Frameworks & Standards

• CIS Benchmarks — AWS Foundations 3.x, Microsoft Azure Foundations 2.x, GCP Foundations 3.x.
• CSA Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) v4 — for multi-cloud governance and compliance mapping.
• NIST SP 800-204 series — for microservice and serverless security.
• OWASP Top 10 for Kubernetes and the NSA / CISA Kubernetes Hardening Guide.
• MITRE ATT&CK for Cloud — for mapping observed attack paths to defender vocabulary.

When to Run a Cloud Security Assessment

Annually is the minimum cadence for a production cloud estate, but the event-driven triggers tend to drive value: post-migration after lifting workloads from on-prem; post-acquisition when inheriting another company's estate; after major IaC repository changes; before SOC 2 / ISO 27001 audits; and when adopting a new provider for the first time.

If your stack is multi-tenant SaaS sitting on top of one of the three providers, a cloud security assessment combined with a focused web application penetration test and API security test covers the realistic attack surface.

Related Services

• Infrastructure Security Testing — for hybrid estates with on-prem components.
• API Security Testing — for the APIs exposed by your cloud workloads.
• Red Team Exercises — adversary emulation that includes cloud as one of many entry points.
• All Penetration Testing Services — the full CDSEC service catalogue.