The Ultimate 2025 Cloud Security Hacking Guide: From Beginner to $100k

2025 Cloud Hacking Landscape:

• Cloud vulnerabilities account for 38% of all critical bug bounty payouts (HackerOne)
• Average bounty for cloud flaws: $3,500 (vs $1,200 for web apps)
• Top hunters earn $15k-$50k per cloud vulnerability
• AWS remains most targeted (62%), followed by Azure (23%) and GCP (15%)

Chapter 1: Cloud Security Fundamentals

1.1 Understanding Cloud Architecture

Modern cloud environments consist of multiple interconnected services that create complex attack surfaces:

Cloud Security Architecture Diagram

Fig 1.1: Comprehensive cloud architecture showing security layers and potential attack paths

Key Components:

1. Identity & Access Management (IAM): The permission backbone controlling who can access what
2. Compute Services: Virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions
3. Storage Systems: Object storage, databases, and file systems
4. Networking: Virtual networks, load balancers, and DNS services
5. Management APIs: Control plane interfaces for configuration

1.2 Essential Cloud Concepts

• IAM Policies: JSON documents defining permissions
• Security Groups: Virtual firewalls for resources
• Resource-Based Policies: Permissions attached to services
• AssumeRole: Temporary credential delegation
• Service Control Policies: Organization-wide guardrails
• Public vs Private Endpoints: Network accessibility
• Shared Responsibility Model: Provider vs customer security duties
• CloudTrail/Activity Logs: Audit trails of API calls
• Managed Identities: Automatic credential management

Chapter 2: Top 10 Cloud Vulnerabilities in 2025

Vulnerability	Avg Bounty	Difficulty	Common in	Example
IAM Privilege Escalation	$5,000-$25k	Medium	AWS, Azure, GCP	aws:iam::123456789012:policy/TooPermissivePolicy
Storage Bucket Misconfigs	$3,000-$10k	Easy	AWS S3, Azure Blob	Publicly readable customer data
Serverless Function Abuse	$4,000-$15k	Medium	AWS Lambda, Azure Functions	Lambda with admin privileges
Cloud Metadata Exploits	$2,500-$8k	Easy	AWS EC2, GCP Compute	Instance credential theft
Container Escape	$7,000-$30k	Hard	EKS, AKS, GKE	Privileged pod breakout
API Gateway Misconfigs	$3,500-$12k	Medium	AWS API Gateway	Unauthenticated internal API access
Database Exposure	$4,500-$20k	Medium	RDS, CosmosDB, Firestore	Publicly queryable database
SSRF to Cloud Metadata	$6,000-$18k	Medium	All providers	Web app → internal cloud API
Cross-Tenant Vulnerabilities	$10,000-$50k	Hard	Azure, AWS Organizations	Accessing other customers' resources
Cloud CI/CD Exploits	$8,000-$25k	Hard	CodeBuild, CloudBuild	Pipeline artifact tampering

Case Study: $28,000 IAM Vulnerability

Discovery: Found an AWS IAM policy that allowed any user to assume admin roles through permission chaining:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/admin-role",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "iam:PassedToService": "lambda.amazonaws.com"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}
    

Exploitation Path:

1. Create Lambda function with admin permissions
2. Configure Lambda to assume the admin role
3. Execute Lambda to gain admin credentials

Impact: Full account takeover possible in 3 steps.

Key Lesson: Always check AssumeRole permissions and session policies, especially when combined with service principals.

Chapter 3: Cloud Hacking Methodology

Step 1: Reconnaissance

Techniques:

• Cloud Metadata Harvesting: Query instance metadata services (169.254.169.254)
• DNS Enumeration: Discover cloud-specific subdomains (s3.amazonaws.com, blob.core.windows.net)
• GitHub Dorking: Search for exposed cloud credentials and config files
• JS File Analysis: Scan web applications for hardcoded cloud API keys
• Certificate Transparency: Find cloud domains through SSL certs

Tools:

• CloudBrute
• CloudScraper
• GitGot
• Amass
• Burp Suite