Find the misconfigurations and attack paths across your AWS, Azure, or GCP estate
Cloud breaches rarely involve zero-days. They exploit IAM misconfigurations, overly permissive storage policies, exposed secrets, and privilege-escalation paths that exist in most cloud environments out of the box. CyVigilant combines CIS-benchmarked configuration audits with manual cloud penetration testing to find and prove every exploitable path.
Configuration audit plus manual cloud penetration testing.
A cloud security assessment at CyVigilant has two complementary layers. The first is a CIS Benchmark configuration audit — a systematic review of your cloud account settings against the CIS AWS Foundations, CIS Azure, or CIS GCP Benchmark at Levels 1 and 2. This surfaces the structural misconfigurations that create the widest attack surface: overly permissive IAM policies, publicly accessible storage buckets, missing CloudTrail logging, unencrypted snapshots, and permissive security group rules.
The second layer is manual cloud penetration testing — our testers attempt to exploit the misconfiguration findings and chain them into real attack paths. This means enumerating privilege-escalation routes through IAM role assumptions, testing whether exposed secrets in environment variables or metadata services lead to lateral movement, and attempting to pivot from a compromised workload into the wider cloud estate. The combination of automated benchmark scanning and manual exploitation gives you both breadth and depth that neither approach delivers alone.
The engagement is aligned to our penetration testing methodology and can be combined with a security architecture review for organizations that want design-level threat modeling alongside the technical assessment.
Assessment scope
- CIS Level 1 & 2
- Benchmark audit
- IAM & privilege-esc
- Manual exploitation
- Secrets & metadata
- Lateral movement paths
- AWS · Azure · GCP
- Multi-cloud support
Every cloud attack surface, manually validated.
Our cloud security assessment covers the five areas responsible for the majority of cloud breaches — with manual exploitation to prove real-world impact.
Identity and access management (IAM)
We enumerate all IAM policies, roles, and service accounts for over-permissive or wildcard privilege grants. We then attempt to assume roles, escalate privileges via policy version updates, and chain IAM misconfigurations into full administrative access — the most common path to cloud account takeover.
Storage and data exposure
S3 bucket policies, Azure Blob containers, and GCS buckets are reviewed for public access and overly permissive ACLs. We test whether exposed storage contains sensitive data — credentials, customer PII, configuration files — and whether access logs are enabled.
Network and perimeter
Security groups, network ACLs, VPC peering, and load-balancer configurations are reviewed for unintended external exposure. We check for open management ports (SSH, RDP, database) reachable from the internet and test whether internal services are segmented from internet-facing workloads.
Secrets and credentials
Environment variables, instance metadata endpoints, container registries, and code repositories are checked for hardcoded secrets, exposed API keys, and credentials accessible via the IMDS without IMDSv2 enforcement. Secrets found during the assessment are immediately triaged and reported.
Privilege escalation paths
We enumerate all routes from a low-privilege identity to administrative access — Lambda execution roles, EC2 instance profiles, managed policy attachment rights, and PassRole abuse. Each viable path is manually demonstrated and documented with a proof-of-concept.
Cloud security assessment — frequently asked questions
Common questions from cloud architects and security teams scoping a cloud assessment.
A cloud configuration audit (CIS Benchmark) is a systematic check of your cloud account settings against a published security baseline — it identifies misconfigurations and policy gaps at scale. A cloud penetration test goes further: our testers attempt to exploit the findings from the audit, chain misconfigurations into real attack paths, and demonstrate the actual impact a threat actor could achieve. CyVigilant delivers both in a single engagement so you get breadth from the audit and depth from the manual exploitation.
A cloud configuration audit (CIS Benchmark) is a systematic check of your cloud account settings against a published security baseline — it identifies misconfigurations and policy gaps at scale. A cloud penetration test goes further: our testers attempt to exploit the findings from the audit, chain misconfigurations into real attack paths, and demonstrate the actual impact a threat actor could achieve. CyVigilant delivers both in a single engagement so you get breadth from the audit and depth from the manual exploitation.
For the configuration audit we need read-only access to your cloud account — typically via a cross-account IAM role with the SecurityAudit managed policy attached. For cloud penetration testing we use a separate low-privilege identity and simulate what an attacker with initial access could achieve. All access is time-boxed, least-privilege, and governed by a signed rules of engagement. We never use production credentials outside the defined test window.
Yes. We support AWS, Azure, and GCP in a single engagement. Multi-cloud assessments are scoped per account or subscription, and we produce a unified report with findings organized by cloud provider and control area. This is particularly valuable for organizations that have applications spanning AWS and Azure, or that have migrated workloads between providers and may have inconsistent security configurations across the estate.
RBI, SEBI, and CERT-In all expect that cloud-hosted systems in scope for their frameworks are assessed with the same rigor as on-premise infrastructure. Cloud penetration testing and CIS-benchmarked configuration audits are accepted as evidence of due diligence for cloud-hosted BFSI applications, health platforms, and government portals. If your application is cloud-hosted and subject to a regulatory audit, the cloud environment should be in scope.
Still have questions?
Talk to a security expertKnow exactly what an attacker can do with your cloud access. what an attacker can do
Book a scoping call with a cloud security expert. We will review your cloud architecture and design an assessment that covers your full estate — configuration audit through manual exploitation.