Before you can secure the cloud, you need to understand how it works and who is responsible for what. This lesson covers the three major cloud service models — IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS — and the shared responsibility model that defines the security boundary between the cloud provider and the customer. You will learn how misunderstanding this boundary is the root cause of most cloud breaches, and how to map your security obligations for each service model.

Identity is the new perimeter in cloud security. This lesson dives deep into cloud IAM — how users, roles, and policies work in AWS, Azure, and GCP, and how attackers exploit overly permissive configurations to escalate privileges and move laterally. You will learn the principle of least privilege in practice, how to audit IAM policies, and how to detect and respond to credential compromise in a cloud environment.

Misconfigured cloud storage is the single most common cause of cloud data breaches. S3 buckets, Azure Blob containers, and GCP Cloud Storage buckets have exposed billions of records due to public access misconfigurations, weak bucket policies, and missing encryption. This lesson teaches you how cloud storage security works, how attackers find and exploit exposed buckets, and how to audit and harden storage configurations.

Cloud networking is fundamentally different from on-premises networking, and attackers exploit those differences. This lesson covers Virtual Private Clouds, security groups, network ACLs, and how to design a defense-in-depth network architecture in the cloud. You will learn how to detect and prevent common cloud network attacks including SSRF, metadata service exploitation, and lateral movement through misconfigured VPC peering.

You cannot defend what you cannot see. This lesson covers the cloud-native logging and monitoring services that give you visibility into your cloud environment — AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor, and GCP Cloud Audit Logs — and how to use them to detect attacks in progress. You will learn what events to alert on, how attackers try to evade logging, and how to build a basic cloud SIEM pipeline.

Containers and Kubernetes have become the default deployment platform for cloud-native applications — and they introduce a new attack surface that most security teams are not prepared for. This lesson covers Docker security hardening, Kubernetes RBAC, network policies, and the most common container escape and cluster compromise techniques used by attackers.

Cloud penetration testing requires a different methodology than traditional network pentesting. This lesson covers the legal and scoping considerations unique to cloud environments, the tools and techniques used to enumerate and exploit cloud misconfigurations, and how to structure a cloud pentest engagement from reconnaissance through reporting.

Cloud security is not just about technical controls — it is also about demonstrating compliance with regulatory frameworks and industry standards. This lesson covers the major compliance frameworks relevant to cloud environments (SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP) and how cloud-native tools like AWS Security Hub, Azure Policy, and GCP Security Command Center map to compliance requirements.

When a cloud breach occurs, the response process is fundamentally different from on-premises incident response. Evidence is ephemeral, infrastructure can be destroyed in seconds, and the blast radius can span multiple accounts and regions. This lesson covers cloud-specific IR procedures, forensic evidence collection, and how to contain and eradicate a cloud compromise while preserving evidence for investigation.

In this capstone lesson, you will apply everything you have learned across the course to a comprehensive cloud security assessment of a realistic multi-service AWS environment. You will perform reconnaissance, identify misconfigurations, exploit a privilege escalation path, detect the attack using CloudTrail logs, and produce a professional security assessment report with prioritized findings and remediation recommendations.