Exploit Weak Bucket Policies for Privileged Access

This beginner-friendly lab shows how overly permissive S3 bucket policies can leak and expose object contents even when listing the bucket is denied. Starting from hardcoded AWS credentials found in a shipping application, you enumerate the target website, read the bucket policy to discover accessible files, exfiltrate a password-protected spreadsheet, and crack it to recover credentials. Those credentials then unlock a hidden CRM containing sensitive customer data.

During a red team engagement for Huge Logistics, your team recovered an IP address and hardcoded AWS credentials from a shipping application. Your objective is to pivot deeper into their cloud infrastructure and demonstrate impact by accessing sensitive data.

• Basic Linux command line knowledge
• AWS CLI installed and configured
• Familiarity with Nmap and Gobuster

• Perform basic web and network enumeration with Nmap and Gobuster
• Inspect website source code to discover backend S3 buckets
• Read S3 bucket policies with get-bucket-policy to identify accessible objects
• Exfiltrate objects from a bucket that denies listing by referencing known file names
• Generate an Office document hash with office2john and crack it using hashcat mode 9600
• Reuse recovered credentials to access a hidden CRM and expose customer PII

In cloud-centric environments, poorly configured resource policies can inadvertently expose sensitive data even without list permissions. Weak passwords on exposed files and secrets stored in spreadsheets remain common causes of real-world breaches.