Modern Adventures in Azure Privilege Escalation

Explores hosting red team phishing pages and payloads on Azure services under Microsoft's trusted domains, using their good reputation to slip past web filters as domain fronting fades.

Shows how Azure VM managed identities with excessive permissions enable privilege escalation: anyone with command execution on a VM can request its token and act with the identity's assigned roles.

Shows that Azure subscription Contributors can read and modify other users' Cloud Shell files, downloading EXT2 home directory images to harvest secrets or injecting commands for cross-user execution.

A now-patched Azure escalation path let Log Analytics Contributor abuse Automation Account rights to reach full Subscription Contributor via Run As accounts; walkthrough of the MSRC report included.

Outlines five cloud security challenges—shadow IT, attacker-defender resource asymmetry, catastrophic misconfigurations—and argues purpose-built cloud penetration testing is the way to address them.

Compares cloud penetration testing across AWS and Azure, explaining the shared responsibility model and why platform-specific nuances matter for methodology and cloud security maturity.