By SentinelOne
July 31, 2024
Cloud penetration testing tools uncover potential weaknesses in enterprises that even the best security experts might miss. They address crucial pain points, detect hidden or unknown vulnerabilities, and give comprehensive security assessments. Cloud security providers are better able to provide higher-quality services, and as a result, organizations enhance their total security posture. These tools help to maintain a security-conscious attitude and neutralize incoming data breaches and cyber security attacks.
In this article, we will discuss the top 10 Cloud Penetration Testing Tools available on the market and explore key factors to consider when selecting the most suitable tools.
What is Penetration Testing in Cloud Computing?
Cloud penetration testing aims to evaluate a cloud system’s strengths and weaknesses to strengthen its overall security posture. Penetration testing involves probing the infrastructure for potential security gaps and addressing them before they become major issues. Cloud penetration testing tests the security strategy implemented by the infrastructure and attempts to exploit it in an attempt to gain unauthorized access and uncover additional weaknesses. The findings of these tests are used to incorporate robust security measures and level up the organization’s cloud security strategy.
What are Cloud Penetration Testing Tools?
Penetration testing tools are software applications or frameworks that assist security professionals in conducting comprehensive security assessments and vulnerability testing. These tools automate various tasks involved in the penetration testing process, making it more efficient and effective. Pen testing tools are designed to simulate real-world attack scenarios, identify vulnerabilities, and provide valuable insights for remediation.
The Need for Cloud Penetration Testing Tools
Cloud penetration testing tools can uncover various vulnerabilities within your infrastructure.
They can help you save on operational expenses by mitigating them before it’s too late. You can focus on the most critical assets first and gradually automate testing across CI/CD pipelines. It also ensures that your code is always up to date. Cloud security penetration testing can address bottlenecks throughout your development cycles. It is also good for API access management and integrates with major cloud security providers.
You need cloud penetration testing tools to emulate advanced attack vectors and figure out how different threat scenarios work in the real world. Only when you get into the mindset of an attacker can you understand how to scope for weaknesses across your cloud estate? It can also help you build rigorous security standards and ensure that your latest practices are in alignment with your upcoming security benchmarks. As the cloud follows a shared responsibility model, penetration testing can help identify compliance gaps and ensure due diligence when it comes to regulation and auditing.
Top cloud pen testing tools will help you simulate real-world attack scenarios and tell you the different ways your company can get breached. You’ll uncover unique insights through them and strengthen your defenses as a result.
Here is a list of the best cloud security tools (often called a CNAPP) in 2025 according to the latest reviews:
#1 SentinelOne
SentinelOne is an advanced autonomous AI-driven cyber security tool designed for the cloud that provides comprehensive protection for companies of all sectors and sizes. It aids in eliminating all risks and challenges, both known and unknown. It can scale enterprises massively to 500,000+ agents per cluster and offers unparalleled multi-tenant customization for ease of cloud infrastructure management. With flexible administration, policy granularity, and controlled updates, the platform offers broad OS support for nearly 20 years of Windows releases to 13 distributions of Linux.
Platform at a Glance
SentinelOne Singularity™ integrates AI-driven tools to mimic the behaviors of attackers, providing insight into exploitable vulnerabilities within cloud infrastructures. The platform’s Offensive Security Engine™ conducts automated red teaming exercises, revealing Verified Exploit Paths™ that highlight the most critical security weaknesses. Purple AI power threats hunting and analysis backed by threat intelligence and AI insights. It can conduct complex investigations and answer users’ queries. Storylines provide contextual visualization of attack sequences for comprehensive forensic analysis and rapid incident response. With this integrated approach, security teams are able to proactively identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities across cloud workloads, containers, and serverless applications.
Features:
- In the cloud, configuration errors are automatically addressed and repaired. Misconfigurations across resources, lateral movement pathways, and impact radius are displayed in graphs. SentinelOne’s 1-click automated remediation is a useful feature for enterprises and gives immediate results.
- Monitoring continuous security posture of new or current cloud services, focusing on security concerns and recommended practices, and notifying of security defaults. SentinelOne offers robust Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM), Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), and Cloud Data Security (CDS) capabilities.
- SentinelOne comes with a unique Offensive Security Engine that provides verified exploit pathways. BinaryVault and patented Storyline technology enhance forensic visibility while PurpleAI delivers deep cloud security insights.
- Infrastructure as a Code: Comparing IaC configuration and implementation to other standards like CIS benchmark and PCI-DSS. To prevent merge and pull requests with hardcoded secrets, support for CI/CD integration can be employed.
- Find the cloud resources/assets that have known CVEs (Intelligence from 10 or more sources with thorough coverage) to handle vulnerabilities.
- Compliance Dashboard: A dashboard for monitoring the compliance status of multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It ensures that infrastructures stay up-to-date with the latest regulations such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, NIST, and others.
- Container Security – SentinelOne offers advanced threat protection for NetApp and Amazon S3 services. It can secure containerized workloads, deployments, and serverless functions.
- Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) reporting for agentless applications and security vulnerability testing for virtual machine snapshots.
- It provides seamless integration with Jira, Slack, PagerDuty, and other platforms.
- Supports Snyk integration and offers both agent-based and agentless vulnerability scanning and assessments
- Real-time secret scanning and detects over 750+ types of secrets across GitLab, BitBucket, Github, and more. Also prevents cloud credentials leaks and misuse across private repositories.
- It offers multi-tenancy support, role-based access control, and history tracking for enhanced security and accountability.
Core Problems SentinelOne Solves
- Proactive Identification of Vulnerabilities: Real-time simulation of attack scenarios simulates real-world scenarios and identifies exploitable weaknesses within a cloud environment.
- Prioritized Risk Mitigation: Exploits paths with evidence; helps security teams focus more on the vulnerabilities that threaten.
- Accelerated Threat Analysis: AI enables automated threats, reducing time to the discovery and resolution of such security incidents.
- Enhanced Forensic Capabilities: Detailed visualizations about the attack and contextual data for enhanced post-incident investigations are available.
- Continuous Security Integration: It is integrated in the CI/CD pipeline for security assessment throughout development life cycles.
Testimonials
“SentinelOne has exceeded our wildest expectations when it comes to securing our cloud infrastructure. We never imagined we would be able to find so many hidden threats. Its Offensive Security Engine was the biggest game-changer for us. We were very pleased with the results. Our team was able to find many hidden attack pathways and address gaps.” -Gartner reviewer
Look at Singularity™ Cloud Security’s ratings and reviews on Gartner Peer Insights and PeerSpot for additional insights.
#2 CloudBrute
CloudBrute is a cloud security tool made to find and fix security flaws and incorrect setups in cloud environments. By proactively evaluating and securing cloud infrastructure, it focuses on boosting cloud security.
Features:
- Security vulnerability scanning: Finds configuration errors and security flaws.
- Automated remediation: Provides issues with automated solutions.
- Verifies conformity to compliance criteria that are specific to the industry.
- Real-time monitoring: Constantly keeping an eye out for prospective hazards.
- Compliance Assurance: Assists in upholding conformance with industry standards.
- Scalability: Ideal for companies using dynamic, expanding cloud infrastructures.
#3 Nessus
Next on the list of Cloud Penetration Testing Tools is Nessus. It is a cloud-based security and vulnerability assessment solution designed to assist organizations in identifying weaknesses within their security systems. This tool offers point-in-time analysis, enabling efficient and swift detection and remediation processes.
Features:
- There is the possibility of false positives
- Vulnerability management at additional cost.
- Observe HIPAA, ISO, NIST, and PCI-DSS compliance benchmarks
Review Nessus’s capabilities as a cloud pen testing tool by checking out its reviews and ratings on TrustRadius.
#4 Scout Suite
Scout Suite has been around for a while and made a name for itself in the cloud pen testing segment. This cloud penetration testing tool is an open-source solution designed to perform security testing on various cloud platforms.
Features:
- Multi-cloud support, allowing audits across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- It performs comprehensive security audits covering identity and access management, network security, storage, databases, and compliance.
- With automated assessment capabilities, it scans cloud resources for security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
- Scout Suite generates detailed reports, providing actionable insights into identified risks and compliance issues.
- It supports continuous monitoring through scheduled or on-demand assessments.
#5 Nmap
Next on the list of Cloud Penetration Testing Tools is Nmap, an open-source vulnerability scanner that proves invaluable for cloud network discovery, management, and monitoring. While primarily tailored for scanning large cloud networks, it remains equally effective for individual networks.
Features:
- Comprehensive network scanning.
- Identification of open ports and services.
- OS detection and version detection.
- Scriptable interaction with the target.
- Support for a wide range of operating systems.
- Ability to scan large networks efficiently and accurately.
Learn how well Nmap can do in cloud penetration testing by reading its TrustRadius and PeerSpot reviews and ratings.
#6 AWS Inspector
Amazon Inspector, a vulnerability management service, regularly checks AWS workloads for software flaws and inadvertent network exposure. For known software vulnerabilities and inadvertent network exposure, Amazon Inspector automatically detects and analyzes active Amazon EC2 instances, container images in the Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and AWS Lambda functions.
Features:
- Automated vulnerability scanning of EC2 instances.
- Detection of common security issues and misconfigurations and assessments for compliance with industry best practices.
- Provides contextualized risk scores for a better understanding of the severity of identified issues.
- Providing detailed insights into potential vulnerabilities in AWS resources.
Learn how AWS Inspector can perform as a cloud pen testing tool by reading its PeerSpot reviews and ratings.
#7 Metasploit
Cybercriminals and ethical hackers can both use the Metasploit framework to scan servers and networks for systemic weaknesses. It may be used with most operating systems and is highly customizable because it is an open-source framework. Metasploit is a free tool.
Features:
- Detects different types of vulnerabilities.
- Offers cloud penetration testing capabilities.
- Support for multiple platforms.
- A wide range of exploits and payloads.
- Has the ability to simulate real-world attack scenarios.
#8 Pacu
AWS exploitation framework Pacu is open-source and developed for offensive security testing against cloud systems. By employing modules to increase its capabilities quickly, Pacu developed and maintained by Rhino Security Labs, enables penetration testers to take advantage of configuration weaknesses in an AWS account.
Features:
- Exploitation Modules: These modules cover areas such as privilege escalation, credential theft, data exfiltration, persistence mechanisms, and more.
- Lateral Movement: Pacu includes functionality for performing lateral movement within an AWS environment. This enables testers to traverse across different accounts and services, simulating an attacker’s actions to escalate privileges and gain unauthorized access.
- Security Assessment: Pacu assists in identifying security weaknesses and misconfigurations within AWS accounts.
#9 BurpSuite
Next on the list of Cloud Penetration Testing Tools is BurpSuite. It is an integrated platform and graphical tool for security testing online applications. From the initial mapping and analysis of an application’s attack surface to discovering and exploiting security flaws, its numerous tools work in perfect harmony to assist the whole testing process.
Features:
- Vulnerability scanning and automated pen-testing capabilities.
- Step-by-step guidance for managing said vulnerabilities.
- Efficient crawling through complex targets using URLs and content analysis, integration for easy ticket generation.
- The ability to test cloud environments and identify misconfigurations in S3 buckets.
Find out what BurpScuite can do as a cloud penetration testing tool by reading its G2 reviews online.
#10 Qualys
Last on our list of Cloud Penetration Testing Tools is Qualys. It offers security insights into both the container host and the containers within it. It empowers users to detect and mitigate security issues in real time proactively. It effectively gathers information on images, image repositories, and image-based containers.
Features:
- The Container Runtime Security add-on enhances visibility into actively running containers, offering heightened insight.
- It enables the implementation of policies to restrict the usage of images with specific vulnerabilities.
- Additionally, it includes pre-built dashboards for immediate analysis and also allows customization of dashboards to suit specific needs.
Learn how Qualys can protect your digital footprint by evaluating its effectiveness as a pen test tool on TrustRadius and PeerSpot.
How to Choose the Best Cloud Penetration Testing Tools?
- Evaluate expertise level: Evaluating cloud penetration testing tools’ expertise level and experience will help you understand their reliability, reputation, and proficiency.
- Check for features: Check if the cloud penetration testing tools have your organization’s required features. Consider every tool’s various specifications and capabilities to find the perfect fit for your company.
- Identify specific requirements: Identify the specific requirements that your organization needs and effectively communicate those with the chosen pen-testing company. Understanding these requirements will help determine the scope of testing and associated costs.
Conclusion
To ensure the security of your cloud infrastructure, we provided the top 10 Cloud Penetration Testing Tools. We have covered a lot of territory, from understanding the cloud-shared responsibility paradigm to introducing the newest technologies and methodologies. We have also seen what factors to consider while selecting cloud penetration testing tools.
If you are new to cloud pen testing an want a complete and holistic solution, you can try SentinelOne. Book a free live demo and find out how.
FAQs
1. Why Is Penetration Testing Important for Cloud Security?
Penetration testing is important for cloud security because it proactively identifies vulnerabilities within cloud environments before malicious actors can exploit them. Through simulating real-world attack scenarios, organizations can discover weaknesses such as misconfigurations, insecure interfaces, and inadequate access controls. This process enhances the overall security posture, ensures compliance with regulatory standards, and helps protect sensitive data from potential breaches.
2. What are the Key Features of Cloud Penetration Testing Tools?
The following are some of the key features of cloud penetration testing tools:
- Cloud Compatibility: Supports various cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Automation: Automated scanning to effectively detect vulnerabilities.
- Real-Time Monitoring: Continuous assessment of cloud assets for emerging threats.
- Comprehensive Reporting: Detailed reports with actionable insights and remediation steps.
- Integration: Seamless integration with DevOps pipelines for ongoing security testing.
- Compliance Assessment: Tools for measuring adherence to industry regulations and security standards.
3. How Do Cloud Penetration Testing Tools Work?
Cloud penetration testing tools work by simulating cyberattacks on cloud infrastructure to identify security vulnerabilities. They scan cloud resources, services, and configurations to detect issues such as open ports, unpatched systems, or weak authentication mechanisms. Using automated scripts and algorithms, these tools perform the tests and provide reports indicating the findings along with recommendations on remediation. Integration into continuous security practices ensures ongoing protection as the cloud environment evolves.
4. Does AWS Have Penetration Testing?
Yes, AWS allows customers to conduct penetration testing on certain AWS services without prior approval, as outlined in their guidelines. AWS provides policies for customers to perform penetration testing on their own instances to enhance security. It’s important to follow AWS’s specific penetration testing policies, as some services or activities may require prior authorization to ensure compliance and avoid service disruptions.
5. Advantages of Cloud Penetration Testing Tool
Cloud pen testing tools’ advantages include all of the following:
- Improved Security: Discover, and remediate identified vulnerabilities; prevent breaches
- Compliance with the regulatory Act: Help fulfill the requirement to follow the compliance set because their respective security standards will be maintained.
- Cost Savings: Avert heavy security incidents cost. Sustain the amount of available downtime.
- Risk Management: Ability to better understand risks through cloud deployments.
- Constant Growth: Insights for enhancing the existing security policies and practices along the way.
- Increased Trust: Higher confidence among the customers and stakeholders in the security measures of the organization.
6. Are Cloud Penetration Testing Tools Safe to Use?
Indeed, cloud penetration testing tools are secure, but only when accessed by qualified professionals according to the guidelines set forth by the cloud service providers. Care should be taken in conducting tests that do not breach the terms of service and disrupt service provision. Testing is a strength for security without weakening system integrity.
