What is Google Cloud Penetration Testing?
Why Conduct a Penetration Test of Your Google Cloud Platform?
By conducting a pentest of their GCP environment, organizations can gain invaluable insights into their security risks that may lead to a successful breach. Here is what you will get after conducting a project with our team:
Validate your existing security controls
A penetration test will evaluate the effectiveness of your current security measures, helping you understand whether they are adequate to protect your cloud-hosted assets from potential threats and improving your ability to prevent attacks.
Test your resilience against targeted attacks
By simulating targeted attacks in a safe and controlled manner, our penetration testing services will ensure that your GCP infrastructure can withstand real-world threats and help develop additional measures to prevent potential breaches, giving you confidence that your critical assets and sensitive data are safe.
Understand the potential impact of an attack on your GCP environment
Our team of experts will analyze the potential outcome of a successful breach for each vulnerability and security risk currently present in your infrastructure, enabling you to prioritize remediation efforts and allocate resources efficiently.
Identify & fix all vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations
Our team will identify all the security risks currently present within your infrastructure, ranging from technical vulnerabilities to vulnerable configurations and weak user roles, allowing you to systematically address these issues, strengthen your overall security posture and reduce your overall risk exposure.
Improve the security of your cloud-hosted assets
By uncovering and addressing vulnerabilities, our penetration testing services will help you enhance the security of your assets hosted on Google Cloud, protecting them from potential breaches that may leak sensitive data or lead to a takeover of your hosted infrastructure.
When Should You Perform a Google Cloud Platform Penetration Test?
You should conduct penetration testing of your GCP infrastructure regularly to identify and address vulnerabilities newly introduced vulnerabilities and stay up to date on the latest hacking techniques.
- Annually as part of a proactive security strategy
- After major changes to the infrastructure or configurations
- Before deploying a new system or application to the public internet
- As part of regulatory or compliance requirements
- Following a security breach or incident
- In response to a new security threat targeting Google Cloud
Our Google Cloud Pentest Services
Google’s infrastructure is designed to be secure out of the box, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be hacked. Given the wide flexibility of the platform and the number of configurations at your disposal, most infrastructures present important security risks that are unknown and specific to how your organization uses Google’s cloud functions and services.
Our services will identify vulnerabilities unique to your infrastructure and assess the security of the most critical GCP components, such as:

Compute Engine & VMs
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Identity & Access Management (IAM)
Common Cybersecurity Risks & Vulnerabilities Identified
Insufficient protection of cloud storage buckets
A security risk where attackers can exploit misconfigured Cloud Storage buckets with weak access controls or lacking encryption settings, potentially gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data stored in the buckets.
Kubernetes Engine cluster vulnerabilities
A security risk where attackers can exploit misconfigured Kubernetes clusters with weak RBAC policies, insecure network policies, or vulnerable container images, potentially compromising applications and gaining access to sensitive data.
Insecure Compute Engine VM configurations
A security risk where attackers can exploit poorly secured virtual machines with weak operating system configurations, software vulnerabilities, or open ports, potentially gaining control over the VM and its resources.
Insecure Identity & Access Management (IAM)
A security risk where attackers can exploit inadequate access controls or weak permission management to gain unauthorized access to GCP resources, potentially altering configurations or stealing sensitive data.
Misconfigured Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
A security risk where attackers can take advantage of poorly configured network settings, firewall rules, or routing controls, potentially gaining unauthorized access to internal systems and sensitive data.
Insecure serverless functions in cloud functions
A security risk where attackers can exploit poorly secured serverless functions with weak code, insecure execution environments, or misconfigured triggers, potentially compromising the application logic and gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data.
GCP Security Shared Responsability Model
Although Google provides a secured environment to build your infrastructure, it remains your responsibility to manage the security of your cloud-hosted assets. This means that you need to ensure that your systems are compliant with all relevant security standards, and that you have appropriate security measures in place to protect your data and systems. Our recommendations will help you take full advantage of GCP’s security features, making it easier to build and maintain a secure environnement.

Common GCP Exploits to Protect Against
In order to accurately represent the security of an organization’s Google Cloud Platform environment, we attempt various attack techniques used in real-world hacking scenarios to breach your cybersecurity. By imitating the attacks of real-world adversaries, we can find and fix critical vulnerabilities susceptible of being exploited and lead to an incident
Abuse of multi-cloud approvals
Security mechanism & detection testing
External perimeter assessment
Cloud functions alteration
Kubernetes engine exploitation
Default settings manipulation
Need Help To Assess And Improve Your Cybersecurity?
Why Conduct Google Cloud Penetration Testing?
Google Cloud Platform Penetration Testing remains the most comprehensive and effective way to test the security of your Google Cloud Platform infrastructure.
Testing your GCP environment helps mitigate most vulnerabilities that could lead to a security breach. It can be customized to meet your specific needs and can be conducted in production without any impact on your live resources. Testing your infrastructure is an important part of any organization’s security strategy, and they can provide peace of mind in knowing that your cloud-hosted assets are properly secured.

Frequently Asked Questions
Couldn’t find the information you were looking for? Ask an expert directly.
The purpose of conducting GCP penetration testing is to identify and evaluate security vulnerabilities within an organization’s cloud infrastructure. Penetration testing helps to identify gaps and weaknesses in the security of the google cloud environment, and provides a proactive approach to improving the overall security posture of an organization.
Our team of experts follows a comprehensive methodology that covers a range of tests targeting various components specific to GCP infrastructures. We use a combination of manual and automated penetration testing techniques to identify vulnerabilities in your environment.
If you intend to conduct penetration testing on your own Google Cloud Platform infrastructure, you are not required to contact Google for approval, according to their own FAQ. While conducting penetration tests on your infrastructure, we meticulously follow the Cloud Platform Acceptable Use Policy and Terms of Service, guaranteeing that our tests only affect your projects and do not impact other customers’ applications.
All we need to get started is access to your GCP environment and your permission to conduct the test. Any access requirements will be discussed with your team in a pre-launch call. Our experts will offer various solutions to access your environment in a secure manner.
Yes, we can test applications hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We offer comprehensive penetration testing of your applications hosted on GCP, examining various aspects beyond the application itself such as the underlying cloud hosting configurations, network settings, access controls, etc.
Given the sensitive nature of assets hosted in the environment and the reliance of modern business operations on cloud technologies, conduct a pentest of your Amazon AWS has become a critical tool for organizations to ensure the security and the availability of their systems and maintain a robust security posture.
Our tests are designed to minimize disruption to your organization’s normal operations and the overwhelming majority of our tests are unnoticeable to our clients. Our team will work with you prior to the project launch to determine any areas that may be susceptible to affect your productivity and will take the necessary steps to minimize any potential impact.
The duration of the test depends on the complexity of the infrastructure and the scope of the assessment. Typically, it may take anywhere from a few days, up to 3 weeks to complete.