February 2, 2024 in scanning by Jonathan Walker3 minutes
There are no shortage of publicly known breaches due to accidentally exposed assets within cloud environments. Few exposures ever make it to the news cycle and occur frequently within the industry due to improper training, lack of infrastructure as code reviews, and misuse of priviledges.
When was the last time you assessed your attack surface? Do you get alerted? How often are those alerts triaged to their full extent? While CSPM tool offerings provide attack surface capabilities, one should never shy away from manual assessments on a regular cadence. Here is a quick guide on how to perform a quick attack surface assessment of AWS EC2 using steampipe and nuclei.
In order to get started, you need to first install steampipe and nuclei. This should help you retrieve a list of public facing assets and scan them.
Steampipe is a tool that allows you to query your cloud resources through SQL. We are going to be using steampipe to get a list of assets to scan. Feel free to go to Steampipe’s installation guide for more information.
Steampipe relies on plugins in order to perform SQL queries against your providers. Steampipe supports a wide variety of services such as AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, and so much more. We will just be covering the basics here but do not shy away from the documentation.
multi-region connections and multi-account connections