Cloud Penetration Testing Nigeria | AWS, Azure & GCP

Cloud Security

Offensive testing for the workloads you moved to the cloud

Nigerian banks, fintechs, hospitals, and government agencies now run workloads in the cloud: customer support channels, payment APIs, data storage. A cloud penetration test examines what you have built on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud the way an attacker would: exploiting access from a leaked access key, a public storage bucket, or an over-permissive role, and exploiting that foothold till the end. AI helps sort identity, configuration and asset data across the cloud account. Senior penetration testers follow the useful leads and verify the attack paths. This is the same human-led approach we apply across our penetration testing services for web, network and mobile environments.

Shared Responsibility

The provider secures the cloud. You secure what you put in it.

Every major provider works on a shared responsibility model: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud secure the physical data centres, the hypervisors, and the platform services they sell. Everything you configure on top of that platform is yours to secure. Your identities, your access policies, your storage permissions, your network rules, your application code.

Most cloud breaches are never as a result of a cloud provider vulnerability. They are usually as a result in flaws in customer configurations: a storage bucket left open, an exposed access key, a role that can read every database in the account, etc. Scanners flag some of this. What they cannot do is chain three low-severity misconfigurations into a path that leads to access to your customer data, which is what an attacker does and what our testing is built to show you before an attacker gains access.

Server racks running the cloud infrastructure examined during a cloud penetration test in Nigeria

Assessment Scope

What a cloud penetration test covers

Identity & Access Management

User, service, and federated identities: password and MFA policy, token handling, privilege escalation paths, and dormant accounts with live keys.

Storage Misconfiguration

Object storage, file shares, snapshots, and backups exposed to the public internet or readable by far more identities than anyone intended.

Over-Permissive Roles

Roles and policies that grant more access than the workload needs, and the escalation chains that turn a modest foothold into account-wide control.

Exposed Management Planes

Consoles, CLIs, and administrative APIs that can be accessed from the open internet, and the controls (or absence of controls) standing in front of them.

Workloads & Containers

Virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and serverless functions: hardening, secrets in images and metadata, and lateral movement between them.

Network Paths

Security groups, peering, and the routes between cloud segments, and between the cloud and whatever remains in your own server room.

Hybrid Estates

Built for the hybrid infrastructure model Nigerian enterprises run

Very few Nigerian organizations run on-premise. The common pattern is a hybrid: core banking or an EMR on-premise, customer channels and APIs in the cloud, with a VPN or dedicated link between the two. Attackers do not respect that boundary. A foothold in a cloud workload can often reach the on-premise network through the same trusted link your applications use, and the reverse is just as true.

Rules of Engagement

We test within provider rules of engagement

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each publish policies on security testing of customer environments. In general, they permit customers to test the resources they own without prior approval for most service types, while restricting a small number of activities outright, denial of service being the usual example. During scoping we confirm the current policy for your provider, identify anything that needs notification or exclusion, and put the agreed boundaries in place before the engagement starts. You stay inside your provider agreement, and so do we.

Evidence & Retest

Evidence you can hand to an auditor, and a retest to close the loop

Every finding in a ClarenSec report is verified by senior penetration testers and documented with a proof of concept. Findings have CVSS scores attached, the responsible party under the shared responsibility model, and remediation steps written for the engineer who has to apply them.

Once your team has remediated, we retest the fixed findings and issue a report as part of the engagement, at no extra cost.

01

Scoping

Accounts, subscriptions, services, and any on-premise segments agreed.

02

Provider policy check

Current testing policy confirmed for your provider; exclusions and notifications handled.

03

Testing

Human-led testing of identities, storage, roles, management planes and workloads, supported by AI analysis, with critical findings escalated immediately.

04

Reporting

Executive summary for the board, technical detail with proof of exploit for your engineers.

05

Retest

Fixed findings verified and a report issued for your auditors.

FAQ

Cloud penetration testing questions, answered

Do we need approval from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud before a penetration test?

Usually not for testing resources you own. The major providers publish security testing policies that permit customer-side penetration testing of most services without prior approval, with a short list of prohibited activities such as denial of service. We check the current policy for your provider during scoping and keep the whole engagement inside it.

How is a cloud penetration test different from a cloud configuration review?

A configuration review benchmarks your settings against a standard and lists the deviations. A cloud penetration test goes further: we attempt to exploit the weaknesses, chain them together, and demonstrate what an attacker could actually do.

Can you test a hybrid environment with both cloud and on-premise systems?

Yes, and for most Nigerian enterprises we recommend it. The link between cloud and on-premise can be abused to increase the impact of an attack, so testing one side in isolation can leave the most interesting paths unexamined.

Will testing disrupt our production environment?

The test plan is agreed before we start: which accounts and subscriptions are in scope, which are excluded, and what happens if we find something severe mid-test. Destructive techniques and denial of service are not carried out by default.

Scope your cloud penetration test

Tell us which provider you run. We will come back with a fixed scope, timeline, and quote.

Request a Consultation

Cloud Penetration Testing for Nigerian Enterprises