# AWS

> Enumeration, exploitation, and post-exploitation techniques targeting AWS environments. Covers IAM abuse, metadata service, S3 misconfigurations, credential harvesting, and lateral movement across accounts and services.

- **URL:** https://hackindex.io/platforms/aws
- **Type:** Platform
- **Tags:** aws, cloud, iam, s3, ec2
- **Published:** 2026-05-24
- **Updated:** 2026-07-13

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest cloud platform, hosting infrastructure for organizations of every size. Cloud pentesting on AWS targets a fundamentally different attack surface than traditional networks: identity and access management (IAM) policies replace firewall rules, API calls replace network protocols, and misconfigured permissions replace open ports as the primary entry points.

AWS-specific attacks focus on IAM privilege escalation (overly permissive policies, assumable roles, cross-account trust), exposed storage (public S3 buckets, EBS snapshots), compute exploitation (EC2 instance metadata service, Lambda function injection, container escapes), and credential harvesting (environment variables, instance profiles, SSM Parameter Store, Secrets Manager). The metadata service at 169.254.169.254 remains one of the most exploited endpoints in cloud environments.

This section covers AWS pentesting techniques: enumeration of IAM users, roles, policies, and resource configurations, exploitation of misconfigured permissions and exposed services, privilege escalation through policy abuse, role chaining, and cross-service pivoting, and post-exploitation including data exfiltration from S3, RDS, and DynamoDB. Core tooling includes Pacu, enumerate-iam, ScoutSuite, Prowler, and the AWS CLI.

## Phases

- [Reconnaissance](https://hackindex.io/platforms/aws/reconnaissance.md): AWS recon covering S3, IAM, CloudFront, and asset exposure mapping (4 guides)
- [Enumeration](https://hackindex.io/platforms/aws/enumeration.md): Guides covering AWS service enum across IAM, EC2, S3, and more (28 guides)
- [Vulnerability Discovery](https://hackindex.io/platforms/aws/vulnerability-discovery.md): Find EC2 SSRF flaws to steal IAM creds via metadata endpoint (1 guides)
- [Exploitation](https://hackindex.io/platforms/aws/exploitation.md): Guides on OIDC trust abuse and SSRF-based IMDS credential theft in AWS (2 guides)
- [Privilege Escalation](https://hackindex.io/platforms/aws/privilege-escalation.md): IAM PassRole and Lambda abuse guides for AWS priv esc (1 guides)
- [Setup](https://hackindex.io/platforms/aws/setup.md): Covers cred types, tool install, and CLI config for AWS pentests (2 guides)