A full AWS infrastructure review across compute, storage, database, networking, and IAM. The kind of audit that finds the quiet defaults nobody revisits after launch: a public bucket, an unencrypted volume, a root account still in daily use.
Almost nobody sets out to leave a storage bucket open to the internet. What happens instead is that a bucket is made public for a legitimate reason during a build, the reason goes away, and the setting does not. Multiply that across a few years of shipping quickly and the environment carries a set of decisions nobody currently remembers making.
AWS operates a shared responsibility model. Amazon secures the infrastructure the cloud runs on. Everything configured inside it, who has access, what is encrypted, what is reachable from the internet, belongs to the customer. Most cloud incidents are not breaches of the platform. They are customer configurations behaving exactly as configured.
For a neobank the exposure is not abstract. The data sitting in those buckets and volumes is user financial data, and the identity layer governing access to it is the same layer that governs access to production. A full review of the environment is the only way to see the accumulated position rather than the most recent change.
Across compute, storage, database, networking, and IAM.
Cloud storage publicly readable on the open internet.
The set prioritized for immediate remediation.
Critical public data exposure was resolved. IAM, encryption, and network security posture improved significantly on retest.
The review covered the complete AWS environment: compute, storage, database, networking, and identity and access management. Nothing was scoped out, which matters for an audit of this type because the findings that combine into real risk usually sit in different services.
Configuration review of a cloud estate is a different discipline from application penetration testing. The work is enumerating what exists, comparing each resource against a hardening baseline, and then determining which deviations are genuinely exploitable in this particular environment rather than theoretically undesirable.
Findings were rated by severity and re-examined after remediation. The retest is what distinguishes the reported outcome from a list of recommendations: the critical public data exposure was confirmed closed rather than assumed closed.
Seven categories of exposure across the cloud environment, from open data to unmanaged identity.
User and operational data exposed to the open internet with no access restriction.
A publicly readable bucket needs no attack. Cloud storage is enumerable, indexes get crawled, and researchers and attackers both scan continuously for open buckets. If it holds user data, the exposure begins the moment the setting is applied rather than the moment somebody exploits it.
EBS volumes and database snapshots holding sensitive user financial data, stored in the clear.
Encryption at rest is what protects data from access paths that bypass the application entirely: a copied snapshot, a detached volume, a backup restored somewhere it should not be. Snapshots are the commonly missed half, because they inherit their encryption state at creation and then persist long after the volume is gone.
The highest-privilege credentials in the account accessed and used without a second factor.
The AWS root account can do things no other identity can, including actions that cannot be restricted by policy. Standard practice is to secure it with hardware or app-based MFA and then stop using it for daily work entirely. Active use without MFA inverts that.
Multi-factor authentication missing across user identities in the AWS environment.
MFA gaps across ordinary users matter because credentials leak constantly, through reuse, phishing, and third-party breaches. A second factor is what stops a leaked password from becoming account access.
User traffic transmitted over HTTP and open to interception in transit.
Traffic served over plain HTTP is readable by anything positioned between the user and the load balancer. For a financial service that includes session tokens and account data moving in the clear, on a path the user cannot inspect.
Clusters reachable from the internet, unencrypted, with backup retention too short for reliable recovery.
A database cluster reachable from the internet has its entire attack surface exposed to everyone rather than to the application. Combined with encryption being off and backup retention being short, the result is a system that is easier to reach, easier to read, and harder to recover.
Policy misconfigurations, unused credentials, weak password policies, and unused security groups.
Identity hygiene is what determines blast radius. Over-permissive policies decide how far an attacker gets after a single account falls, unused credentials are access nobody is watching, and unused security groups are open paths nobody remembers opening.
Publicly readable storage required no exploit and no skill to reach. Anyone who found the bucket could read it. The most severe issue in a cloud environment is frequently the most boring one.
Individually each was minor. Collectively they describe an environment where hardening was not a routine step, which is the condition that produces the critical finding in the first place.
Root holds privileges no IAM policy can restrict. Using it without a second factor means the strongest credentials in the account are protected by a password alone.
Unencrypted volumes and snapshots address data at rest. A load balancer serving clear-text HTTP addresses data in transit. Getting one right and not the other leaves the data exposed, just at a different point.
Fintech companies on AWS or any major cloud.
Neobanks and digital financial services with cloud-first architecture.
Companies pre-fundraising or pre-audit needing a comprehensive cloud hygiene review.
50 findings across authentication, cross-account access, and API authorization on a multi-tenant procurement platform.
Read the case study Fintech & PaymentsFive live phishing and crypto dusting scenarios run against the custody and operations teams. All five blocked.
Read the case studyBook a 30-minute walkthrough. We'll point CredShields at a scoped asset and show you live findings by the end of the call.
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