Pacu

AWS IAM is both the most powerful and most abused system in cloud security. Get the permissions wrong — even slightly — and an attacker can go from a low-privilege read-only role to full AdministratorAccess in under five minutes. This guide covers every IAM privilege escalation technique that works in 2026. Real attack paths, real commands, detection notes where relevant. If you’re doing cloud pentesting, red team engagements, or studying for AWS security certs — this is the complete reference. ...

Bottom line: Cloud pentesting without the right toolchain is slow and error-prone. Pacu owns AWS post-exploitation, ScoutSuite handles multi-cloud audits, Prowler covers compliance and misconfiguration hunting, and CloudMapper visualizes what everything connects to. You need all of them. Why Cloud Pentesting Tools Matter Cloud infrastructure is not a server you can Nmap. The attack surface is IAM policies, S3 bucket permissions, Lambda function roles, EC2 metadata endpoints, VPC peering configurations, and a thousand other abstractions that have no equivalent in traditional on-prem pentesting. ...

AWS is the biggest cloud provider on the planet. It’s also one of the most common attack surfaces in modern red team engagements. If you’re doing pentesting in 2026 and you don’t understand how to attack AWS, you’re leaving scope on the table. This guide covers the full attack chain — from initial recon through privilege escalation — with real commands and the tools that actually matter. You need a lab environment to practice this. Spin up a dedicated AWS account for testing. If you want a VPS to run attack tooling from, Vultr and DigitalOcean are solid choices — cheap, fast, and you can tear them down when done. ...