Cloud environments shift the security paradigm from perimeter defence to configuration management. Under the shared responsibility model, the cloud provider secures the infrastructure; the customer secures the configuration, data, access, and applications. Cloud penetration testing evaluates whether that customer-side responsibility is being met.
What Cloud Security Testing Covers
A cloud security assessment typically evaluates: IAM (Identity and Access Management) configuration — over-permissioned roles, unused credentials, access key rotation; storage security — publicly accessible buckets/blobs, encryption at rest and in transit, access policies; network configuration — security groups, NACLs, VPC peering, exposed management interfaces; compute security — instance configurations, exposed metadata services, container and Kubernetes security; logging and monitoring — whether CloudTrail/Azure Activity Log/Cloud Audit Logs are enabled and forwarded; secrets management — how API keys, database credentials, and certificates are stored and rotated; and data residency and compliance — whether data is stored in approved regions.
The Most Common Findings
In our experience, the most frequent cloud security issues across all three major providers are: over-permissioned IAM roles (the single most dangerous and most common finding), publicly accessible storage, missing or insufficient logging, unrotated long-lived access keys, flat network architectures that allow unrestricted lateral movement, and container misconfigurations (privileged containers, exposed dashboards, secrets in environment variables).
Why Manual Assessment Matters
Automated cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools check configuration against benchmarks like CIS, which is valuable for breadth. But manual assessment adds critical depth: an expert tester traces attack paths through the environment, demonstrating how an attacker could chain a misconfigured IAM role with a publicly accessible storage bucket and an exposed metadata service to achieve full account compromise. This attack-path analysis is what turns a list of misconfigurations into a clear picture of real risk.
How Simuna Infosec Approaches Cloud Testing
We combine automated configuration assessment against CIS benchmarks with manual attack-path tracing across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. The automation identifies the misconfigurations; the manual testing shows how an attacker would chain them to achieve meaningful compromise.