Exploiting AWS with Pacu

Legal Notice: This skill is for authorized penetration testing and educational purposes only. Pacu performs active enumeration, privilege escalation, persistence, and backdooring against live AWS accounts. Run it ONLY against accounts you own or have explicit written authorization (scope/Rules of Engagement) to test. Many modules create durable changes (new IAM users, access keys, policies); track and remove everything. Unauthorized use is illegal under the CFAA and equivalent laws.

Overview

Pacu is the open-source AWS exploitation framework from Rhino Security Labs. It is the cloud-pentest analogue of Metasploit: a modular Python console that manages target sessions, enumerates an AWS account, identifies privilege-escalation paths, and executes persistence/backdooring/exfiltration modules — all backed by a local SQLite database that records every enumerated resource so modules can chain off one another's findings.

A Pacu engagement follows a consistent arc. You create a named session, load AWS keys (with set_keys or by importing from ~/.aws/credentials), confirm the identity with whoami, then enumerate IAM and the rest of the account. …