Google Cloud VM Instances - Lab setup

Introduction

An instance is a virtual machine (VM) hosted on Google's infrastructure. You can create an instance or create a group of managed instances by using the Google Cloud console, the Google Cloud CLI, or the Compute Engine API.

GCP Compute Engine instances can run the public images for Linux and Windows Server that Google provides as well as private custom images that you can create or import from your existing systems. You can also deploy Docker containers, which are automatically launched on instances running the Container-Optimized OS public image.

This service is the equivalent of AWS's EC2.

What are we going to cover

We will look at some attacks that can occur due to misconfigurations in Google Cloud Platform, specifically around service accounts and badly managed permissions.

This module will primarily cover

• An introduction to google cloud instances, creating and setting up

• Extracting service account tokens using app weaknesses

• Escalating privileges in Google Cloud