Azure Deployment Scripts: Assuming User-Assigned Managed Identities

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.

After a dull conference, the author concludes cloud pentesting is fundamentally the same as traditional testing: virtualized or shared, the underlying technology and security controls hardly change.

Syncing Domain Admins into Entra ID lets attackers pivot from compromised on-prem AD to the cloud, and back via password writeback. CIS and Microsoft advise keeping privileged admin accounts cloud-only.

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.

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.