The cloud is not just "someone else’s computer". It is a complex, programmable infrastructure where a single misconfiguration can expose your entire enterprise.
Traditional infrastructure security focuses on "patching servers." In the cloud, the risks have shifted to the Management Plane. Whether you operate on AWS, Azure, or GCP, your primary threats now involve Identity and Access Management (IAM) over-privilege, insecure secret handling, and the accidental exposure of cloud-native services.
At Mongoose, our Cloud Security Assessment goes beyond a simple compliance checklist. We perform a deep-dive interrogation of your cloud configuration, simulating the techniques modern adversaries use to achieve lateral movement and data exfiltration within virtualised environments.
The vast majority of cloud breaches originate from over-privileged accounts or leaked API keys. In a cloud environment, IAM is the new perimeter.
The Serverless Privilege Escalation
During a recent audit for a UK SaaS provider, we identified a Lambda function with an over-privileged IAM role. While the function was intended only to read from an S3 bucket, its policy included iam:PassRole. By exploiting a code injection flaw in the function, we were able to pass a much higher-privileged role to a new resource, eventually granting us full Administrative access to the entire AWS organisation. This breach occurred without a single "unpatched server" being involved; it was purely a failure of cloud-native authorisation logic.
Automated cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools are excellent for identifying "public" buckets, but they lack the adversarial intuition to understand how complex permissions can be chained together.
The Intelligence Gap
Automated tools focus on "known-knowns"; common software signatures and unpatched services. They are incapable of:
IAM Privilege Escalation:
Identifying "hidden" paths where a low-privilege user can move through different roles to gain administrative control.
Cross-Account Trust Risks:
Auditing how your different cloud accounts or third-party integrations interact, ensuring a compromise in one doesn't lead to a total estate failure.
Secret Management Flaws:
Finding hardcoded credentials in Lambda environment variables, user data scripts, or insecurely managed Key Vaults.
Our methodology is aligned with the CIS Benchmarks and the AWS/Azure Well-Architected Frameworks, but it is driven by an offensive mindset.
Management Plane & IAM Review
The core of any cloud audit is the Identity layer. We scrutinise your IAM policies for:
Principle of Least Privilege:
MFA Enforcement:
Service Account Security:
Storage & Database Interrogation
We move beyond "Public vs Private" to look at the granular access controls governing your most sensitive data.
S3/Blob/Bucket Security:
Snapshot & Backup Exposure:
Network & Edge Security
We audit the virtual networking layer that connects your cloud services.
VPC & VNet Segmentation:
Security Group & NSG Auditing:
Serverless & Container Security
For modern workloads, we perform a specialised review of your orchestration and compute layers.
Lambda/Cloud Function Auditing:
Kubernetes (K8s) & Container Security:
We provide the technical depth required by IT teams and the strategic clarity needed by stakeholders.
Contextual Risk Analysis:
We don't just give you a list of "failed" checks. We explain the real-world attack path that a specific misconfiguration enables.
IaC Integration:
We can review your Terraform, Bicep, or CloudFormation templates to identify security flaws before they are ever deployed to production.
Remediation Roadmaps:
Our reports provide specific, actionable CLI commands or console steps to fix every identified issue.
What is the difference between a Cloud Pentest and a Cloud Audit?
Do we need to notify AWS/Azure/GCP before you start?
Can you audit hybrid-cloud environments?
Is this just an automated scan?
Ready to see the gaps others are missing?
Don't wait for a real adversary to find the pathway. Contact our team today to discuss a tailored manual assessment for your organisation.
