Pivoting Clouds in AWS Organizations – Part 1: Leveraging Account Creation, Trusted Access, and Delegated Admin

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.

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.

Converts compromised AWS API keys, whether permanent AKIA or temporary ASIA credentials, into browser console access via the federation endpoint, easing recon compared with wrangling CLI syntax.

Gartner attributes up to 95% of cloud breaches to human configuration errors; NetSPI catalogs usual suspects like missing MFA, cloud-on-prem integration, and over-permissioned accounts.