Red Team Tactics: Lateral Movement in Cloud Environments

Red Team Tactics: Lateral Movement in Cloud Environments

Introduction

Cloud-native infrastructure has transformed how applications are built — but also how attackers operate.
A single misconfigured Lambda, exposed token, or over-permissive role can become the launchpad for deep, lateral movement.

This article explores how red teams emulate real-world adversaries to identify trust violations, privilege escalation paths, and persistence mechanisms in cloud environments — long before threat actors exploit them.

Common Tactics for Lateral Movement

Credential Harvesting

Attackers often begin by extracting credentials, such as:

• Temporary AWS STS tokens
• IAM role keys from ECS metadata endpoints
• Secrets in CI/CD environments, .env files, or debug logs

They hunt for access tokens in storage buckets, container layers, instance metadata, and exposed Git repositories.

Cross-Account Enumeration

Modern cloud architectures often include cross-account access and resource sharing, which attackers can enumerate and exploit:

• AssumeRole trust relationships misconfigured with wildcard principals
• Exposed resource-based policies in S3, SNS, or Lambda
• Abused dev/staging roles to pivot into production environments

Privilege Escalation & Environment Pivoting

Once inside, attackers look for:

• Chained IAM role assumptions
• Misconfigured policies like iam:PassRole or sts:AssumeRole
• Legacy IAM users with privileged access but no MFA

Red teams simulate how adversaries jump environments using dangling permissions or forgotten infrastructure.

Stealth & Persistence

Advanced threat actors aim to persist silently, using techniques such as:

• Deploying hidden IAM roles or scheduled Lambda invocations
• Embedding payloads in legitimate-looking CloudWatch scripts or S3 buckets
• Manipulating CloudFormation templates or IAM policy versions

They evade default alerting systems and reappear post-remediation.

Real-World Red Team Case

In a red team simulation for a mid-size SaaS provider, we executed a full lateral movement chain:

1. Located a public S3 bucket with exposed CI logs and temp AWS credentials
2. Assumed a developer IAM role with sts:AssumeRole to access test environment
3. Enumerated production role trust policies via misconfigured permissions
4. Pivoted to access customer PII and billing records
5. Remained undetected due to disabled GuardDuty + no CloudTrail alerts

The entire path exploited default configurations, weak policy hygiene, and missing logging.

What We Learned

1. Trust Relationships Are Attack Paths

• Avoid broad trust policies ("Principal": "*" or wildcards)
• Audit IAM role assumptions regularly
• Enforce environment separation — dev/test roles shouldn’t touch prod

2. Monitor Like an Attacker Would

• Enable CloudTrail and GuardDuty across all regions
• Rotate IAM credentials frequently
• Track sts:AssumeRole, iam:PassRole, and sensitive API actions

3. Red Team Continuously

Cloud environments change weekly.
Just because you're secure today doesn't mean you'll stay that way tomorrow.

Simulate adversaries to proactively surface unknown risk.

Ready to See What Real Attackers Could Do in Your Cloud?

Misconfigured identities, overly permissive roles, and unmonitored services make cloud environments a prime target.

Siber Ninja’s Red Teaming & Adversary Simulation services go beyond checklists to uncover:

• Lateral movement paths via cloud-native misconfigurations

• Identity and access abuse in federated environments

• Exploitable gaps between dev, staging, and prod

• Real-world attack paths that evade traditional monitoring

• Book a Red Team Engagement

• Schedule a Cloud Security Simulation Workshop

Don’t wait for an incident response report to show you what was possible.
Let your red team show you what’s exploitable — today.