Execute Azure Credential Shuffle to Achieve Objectives

This beginner-friendly red team lab walks you through the Azure kill chain, showing how attackers work their way to privileged access by repeating cycles of enumeration, lateral movement, and privilege escalation. Starting from a single leaked password, you perform the classic credential shuffle across Entra ID, service principals, an Azure VM, and storage accounts until you reach sensitive data. It reinforces how password reuse and hardcoded credentials remain just as dangerous in Azure as they are on-premises.

After gaining initial access to Mega Big Tech, your red team recovered a password from the connection string of a compromised Azure Web App. You are tasked with turning that foothold into privileged access and reaching sensitive business data to demonstrate impact.

• Basic Windows command-line knowledge
• Familiarity with Azure PowerShell (Az and AzureAD modules)

• Enumerate Entra ID users, groups, administrative units, and scoped role assignments
• Abuse the Authentication Administrator role to reset another user's password
• Take over a service principal by adding a new client secret via Microsoft Graph
• Request and inspect Azure access tokens (JWTs) with Get-AzAccessToken
• Enumerate RBAC role assignments and read blobs from Azure storage containers
• Move laterally to an Azure VM using PowerShell Remoting and Evil-WinRM
• Perform VM post-exploitation, including querying the Instance Metadata Service and hunting Custom Script Extension files for hardcoded credentials

Any sufficiently complex cloud tenant becomes a tangled web of object-to-object control where password reuse and hardcoded credentials enable lateral and vertical movement. Defenders reduce this risk with strong credential hygiene, Key Vault, password rotation, and regular penetration testing.