Cloud Attack Surface Review for AWS/GCP

Cloud security isn’t like traditional networks. Forget firewalls—in the cloud, your perimeter is defined by IAM policies and API permissions. Bad guys don’t exploit zero-days on your load balancer; they steal a developer’s access key, assume a role, and quietly download your entire S3 bucket.

This Cloud Attack Surface Review evaluates your AWS and GCP environments the way attackers do. We’re looking for identity sprawl, exposed storage, weak CI/CD pipelines, and the gaps that actually lead to breaches. No compliance checkboxes—just the vulnerabilities that matter.

Identity Is Your New Perimeter

In AWS and GCP, identity is everything. A single over-privileged IAM role can give an attacker full control of your entire organization.

Here’s what we actually look for—the vectors that lead to real breaches:

• Identity Sprawl: Too many users with too much access. Dormant service accounts nobody remembers about. Complex trust relationships between accounts that create unintended access paths.
• Storage Exposure: Public S3 buckets. Cloud Storage buckets with wrong ACLs. Unencrypted EBS snapshots sitting around.
• CI/CD Nightmare: Hardcoded secrets in your repo. GitHub Actions runners with way too much permission. Deployment roles that grant access they shouldn’t.
• Network Gaps: Security groups that are too open. Kubernetes services exposed to the world. WAFs that can be bypassed.

How We Actually Do This

We start with read-only access to your infrastructure—no changes, just observation. Here’s what we examine:

1. Find Everything That’s Exposed: All your regions, VPCs, API gateways, load balancers, even rogue IPs that shouldn’t be public.
2. Audit Your IAM: Look for dangerous permissions like iam:PassRole that let attackers escalate. Check if MFA is enforced. Estimate how bad it would be if a key got stolen.
3. Review Your Compute: EC2 instances, GCP Compute Engine, container registries, Kubernetes clusters—what’s the baseline security?
4. Lock Down Your Data: S3 buckets, KMS keys, databases. Can your data be accessed from outside the organization? If so, it shouldn’t be.
5. Check Your Logging: Is CloudTrail actually collecting logs? Are they going to a SIEM? Are they protected from tampering?

Tools We Use

Nothing fancy—just the tools that actually work:

• Cloud CLIs: AWS CLI and gcloud to pull your configuration
• Security Scanners: Prowler and ScoutSuite to identify misconfigurations fast
• IAM Analysis: Cloudsplaining to find privilege escalation paths
• Exposure Checks: Shodan and Nmap to see what’s actually exposed to the internet
• Secret Scanning: GitHub tools and TruffleHog to find hardcoded credentials

What You Actually Get

Not a generic compliance report. A practical list your DevOps team can actually fix:

• Cloud Attack Surface Map: Visual inventory of everything exposed. How accounts trust each other. Where an attacker could pivot.
• IAM Risk List: Every account with too much access. Ranked by how badly they’d damage you if compromised.
• Storage & Exposure Report: Public buckets. Open security groups. APIs that shouldn’t be exposed.
• CI/CD Risks: Where secrets are leaking. Which deployment roles are too powerful.
• 45-Day Fix Plan: Prioritized steps to lock everything down, aligned with CIS and ISO standards.

Typical Cloud Risk Matrix

Risk Priority	Control Gap / Finding	Attack Vector & Business Impact	Remediation Owner
Critical	Over-privileged EC2 Instance Profile	An SSRF vulnerability in a web app could allow an attacker to query the metadata service, retrieve credentials, and assume an AdministratorAccess role.	DevOps / IAM Admin
High	Publicly Writable S3 Bucket	Misconfigured bucket ACLs allow unauthenticated users to overwrite deployment artifacts, leading to potential supply chain compromise.	Cloud Engineering
Medium	Hardcoded AWS Keys in GitHub	Long-lived access keys found in a legacy repository; while inactive, they pose a severe risk if the repository is made public or compromised.	SecOps / Dev Team
Low	Missing CloudTrail Log Encryption	CloudTrail logs are collected but not encrypted at rest via KMS, marginally increasing the risk of log tampering.	Security Engineering

Fix It in 45 Days

Don’t let this report sit on a shelf. Here’s how to actually improve:

• Week 1 (Emergency Lockdown): Kill the critical stuff immediately. Lock down public S3 buckets. Revoke over-privileged IAM roles. Get secrets out of your code.
• Weeks 2-3 (Right-Size Access): Stop using long-lived access keys. Switch to temporary credentials. Make MFA mandatory everywhere.
• Weeks 4-5 (Harden the Edges): Tighten security groups. Block unnecessary outbound traffic. Route everything through a WAF.
• Week 6+ (Detection): Make sure your logs are actually going to your SIEM. Set up alerts for suspicious role changes and unusual data access.

Cloud security is only hard if you treat it like traditional networks. Understanding how your infrastructure actually works—and how attackers target it—changes everything.