AWS Penetration Testing Methodology — End-to-End Playbook
AWS customer-policy permissions, Pacu/ScoutSuite/CloudFox recon, IAM privilege escalation, IMDSv1 vs IMDSv2, EKS pod-to-cluster pivots, and EBS snapshot exfiltration.
Certified operators find the attack path a scanner never will — then hand you the proof, the fix, and a free retest to confirm it holds.
Every engagement ships with the AxVeil platform — findings land in your live dashboard the day we find them.
Run against the frameworks buyers ask about
No raw scanner output ships in a report — every finding is hand-validated.
The same operator re-validates your fixes, included in every engagement.
A certified lead scopes, tests, and signs — no anonymous rotation.
No fabricated clients, logos, or efficacy percentages anywhere on this site.
We publish verifiable commitments and externally sourced benchmarks only — never self-reported efficacy percentages we cannot audit.
Six disciplines, one operator-led standard. From API fuzzing to nation-state emulation, every engagement is human-led, mapped to a published framework, and ships a report your engineers can act on — with a free retest.
Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing
Gray-box by default: authenticated testing at every role, plus an unauthenticated black-box pass, across web, API, mobile, network and cloud. Every finding is human-validated, CVSS-scored and shipped with a working proof of concept.
Every finding lands in your live dashboard with CVSS v3.1 + v4.0 vectors, curl-ready PoC exploits and developer-facing remediation — then syncs two-way to Jira so your team tracks the fix where they already work. One free retest within 30 days. Also exports to DefectDojo and GitHub Security.
Frameworks
Deliverables
Full Kill-Chain Adversary Operations
Goal-driven operations against production: initial access, lateral movement, persistence and objective completion under realistic OPSEC — then a purple-team replay so your SOC keeps the detections.
Per-engagement C2 infrastructure, payloads tested against your EDR build, timestamped operator logs. Delivered with a kill-chain narrative, ATT&CK heat-map and Sigma/KQL/SPL detection content.
Frameworks
Deliverables
Breach & Attack Simulation · Purple Team
Continuous BAS mapped to the techniques of named threat actors. Validate SOC, SIEM and EDR coverage technique-by-technique, then walk away with detection rules written against your own telemetry.
Per-technique detection matrix (fired / alerted / triaged / time-to-detect), trended ATT&CK heat-map, and a versioned Sigma / KQL / SPL / EQL / CQL detection pack you keep and extend.
Frameworks
Deliverables
AWS · Azure · GCP · OCI Assessment
CSPM tooling tells you what is misconfigured. We prove which misconfigurations chain into a working attack path — IAM graph analysis, Kubernetes admission testing, serverless and IaC review.
Read-only IAM graph extraction, directed attack-path diagram with per-edge PoCs, EKS/AKS/GKE RBAC review, and Terraform / Bicep remediation snippets. Mapped to CIS Benchmarks and MITRE ATT&CK Cloud.
Frameworks
Deliverables
Program Build & CI/CD Pipeline Hardening
Security shifted to the keyboard, not the pull request. SAST + SCA tuning, secret scanning at pre-commit, IaC policy-as-code and runtime DAST wired into CI/CD — with severity gates, owners and SLAs.
Sub-5-second pre-commit feedback, tuned Semgrep/CodeQL rule packs, OPA/Rego policy gates, SPDX + CycloneDX SBOMs, and DORA metrics before/after. Median developer impact: +30s per PR.
Frameworks
Deliverables
SOC 2 · ISO 27001 · PCI DSS · GDPR · DPDP
Gap analysis, technical control testing and audit-ready evidence — delivered by people who have lived through these audits on both sides of the table. Same engineers who run our VAPT practice test the controls.
Control-by-control gap analysis, risk-treatment plan with named owners, policy drafting, technical control testing with CVSS, and assessor liaison through fieldwork. Dual-track GDPR + DPDP mapping where it helps.
Frameworks
Deliverables
Not sure which engagement fits your risk picture?
Send us your asset inventory and audit deadline — we scope it and respond with a fixed-fee proposal and a sample report from a comparable engagement.
Three anonymised engagements we publish in full — scope, methodology, representative findings, and measured outcomes. No logos, no invented quotes: read the work itself.
Four things define an operator-led engagement. Below them, six axes where it diverges from a generic VAPT against the industry baseline.
Junior tester running a scanner playbook, rotated mid-engagement.
A CRTO/OSCP-certified operator scopes, tests, and signs the report — named in the SOW.
A list of scanner hits passed through CVSS with no validation.
Every finding is hand-exploited to confirm real impact — false positives are filtered out before you see them.
Isolated medium-severity issues that look ignorable in a vacuum.
We chain low/medium issues into full attack paths — showing how a foothold becomes domain admin.
Report delivered, engagement closed — re-validation is a new SOW and a new bill.
A free retest within 30 days, run by the same operator, confirms your fixes actually hold.
Sourced figures. We do not publish self-reported efficacy stats.
No black boxes. Every engagement runs the same operator-led lifecycle — and you know exactly what lands in your inbox at each stage.
We agree the rules of engagement, in-scope assets, objectives and OPSEC constraints — then name the operator who signs the SOW.
Active and passive reconnaissance maps your real attack surface — the assets, identities and exposures an adversary would find first.
Every candidate finding is manually exploited and chained into a real attack path — foothold to objective — with reproducible proof.
A one-page board summary plus a technical report: each finding scored, reproduced, and paired with a remediation ticket your engineers can action.
Within 30 days the same operator re-runs the validated findings against your fixes — at no extra cost — and confirms closure in writing.
Every engagement closes with a defined set of artifacts — from a board-ready summary to a signed retest letter. Here is exactly what lands in your inbox.
One-page, board-ready risk narrative — no jargon, mapped to business impact and a clear remediation runway.
PDF · 1 pagePer-finding detail: reproducible proof-of-concept, CVSS vector, affected assets, and evidence screenshots.
PDF · full detailPrioritised, developer-ready fix tickets — exact patch versions, config changes, and code-level direction.
Per findingAfter the free 30-day retest, a signed attestation confirming which findings are closed — share it with auditors and clients.
Signed · auditor-readyEvery finding lands in your private client portal the day we find it — track remediation, sync tickets straight to Jira, and generate the board-ready PDF from the same live data. Preview the client portal, executive dashboard, and developer report below.
| Severity | Finding | Status | Exploit | Remediation | Jira |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CRITICAL | Unauthenticated RCE — File Upload | In Progress | YES | 0/1 | SEC-104 |
| HIGH | Reflected XSS in Search Parameter | In Progress | YES | 1/3 | SEC-108 |
| MEDIUM | Session Cookies Missing Secure Flags | Unresolved | — | 0/2 | SEC-111 |
| MEDIUM | Username Enumeration | Unresolved | — | 0/1 | SEC-112 |
| LOW | Missing HTTP Security Headers | Resolved | — | 1/1 | SEC-115 |
| LOW | SSL/TLS Lucky13 | Resolved | — | 4/4 | SEC-118 |
Findings land live
Every validated finding is posted to your portal the day we confirm it — not weeks later in a PDF.
Two-way Jira sync
Push any finding to your team's Jira board; status flows back so remediation is tracked where your engineers already work.
Auto-generated report
The board-ready PDF is generated from the same live dashboard data — the report can never contradict the tracker.
Following the 30-day retest, AxVeil re-validates each prior finding and issues a signed attestation of which issues are confirmed remediated. Hand it to auditors, regulators, or your customers as independent proof your fixes hold.
Signed by
Lead Operator
OSCP · CRTO
We map each engagement to the frameworks you answer to and the threats your sector actually faces — not a generic checklist.
PCI DSS v4.0 · SOC 2 · DORA
Payment-rail abuse, broken auth, and API logic flaws on money movement.
SOC 2 · ISO 27001 · GDPR
Multi-tenant isolation breaks and IDOR exposing other customers' data.
HIPAA · GDPR · ISO 27001
PHI exfiltration and ransomware against legacy clinical systems.
PCI DSS v4.0 · GDPR · SOC 2
Card skimming, coupon/price tampering, and account-takeover at scale.
NIST CSF · ISO 27001 · IEC 62443
OT/IT convergence gaps and segmentation failures on operational networks.
NIST CSF · ISO 27001 · IEC 62443
Citizen-data exposure and supply-chain compromise of public services.
Regional depth where you need it: DORA & NIS2 across the EU, SAMA & CBUAE in the Gulf, and SOC 2 · PCI DSS · ISO 27001 worldwide — all delivered remote-first.
Every engagement is scoped, executed, reported and debriefed by senior, certified red teamers and penetration testers — never outsourced to a junior or a scan you could have run yourself.
Certified · Senior · Hands-on
Every AxVeil engagement is delivered by certified, senior offensive-security operators — not automated scans re-badged as a pentest. The practice runs enterprise-scale VAPT programmes across banking, government, and shipping & logistics — documented, with scope and measured outcomes, in the anonymised case studies below. Our operators translate technical findings into business risk and drive remediation directly with your development and IT teams.
Enterprise-scale programmes — documented
Team Certifications
Specialises In
Engagements that span multiple attack surfaces are staffed with the right specialist for each domain. Every operator on your engagement is vetted, certified, and named in the SOW before kickoff — no anonymous hands on your environment.
AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, IAM attack paths.
OWASP Top 10, ASVS, GraphQL, OAuth/SAML/OIDC chains.
Frida, Objection, MobSF, MASVS-aligned testing.
ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2, PCI DSS v4, DPDP, RBI / SEBI mapping.
OSCP / OSWE / CRTO certified? Apply to join the AxVeil operator roster.
View open rolesor email careers@axveil.com
Attack methodologies, compliance playbooks, and threat-intel breakdowns — written by the operators who run the engagements.
Straight answers on methodology, deliverables, and how we run a safe, accountable engagement.
A scanner produces a list of potential issues scored by CVSS with no validation. We start there, then a certified operator manually exploits each candidate finding, filters out false positives, and chains low and medium issues into real attack paths. You only ever see findings we have proven are exploitable.
A CRTO/OSCP-certified operator, named in your Statement of Work, scopes the engagement, runs the testing, and signs the report. There is no anonymous junior rotation and no offshore hand-off mid-engagement — the person who scopes it is the person who tests it.
A one-page board summary for leadership plus a full technical report. Every finding is CVSS-scored, paired with a reproducible proof of concept, and written up as a remediation ticket your engineers can action directly. We also map findings to the frameworks and regulations relevant to your sector.
Yes. Within 30 days of report delivery, the same operator re-runs the validated findings against your fixes at no additional cost and confirms closure in writing. Re-validation is part of every engagement, not a separate SOW.
We agree explicit rules of engagement and OPSEC constraints during scoping, including testing windows, out-of-scope assets, and escalation contacts. Destructive or high-risk techniques are only run with written sign-off, and red-team work can be staged against a mirror or run under assumed-breach to limit production impact.
Most standard VAPT engagements are scoped within a few business days of receiving your asset inventory and objectives. Engagement length depends on scope, but we provide a fixed-fee proposal with a timeline before any work begins — no open-ended billing.
Send us your asset inventory and audit deadline. We scope it and respond with a fixed-fee proposal and a sample report from a comparable engagement — usually within a few business days.