AWS Workshop: Simulate a Privilege Escalation Attack

Join WiCyS for a hands-on AWS security workshop exploring privilege escalation in cloud environments. Participants will learn how misconfigured or overly permissive AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions can be abused to escalate privileges and gain unauthorized levels of access. Through practical demonstrations and guided exercises, the workshop will explore various privilege escalation techniques while highlighting the importance of properly securing IAM roles, policies, and permissions.

The workshop will be led by a GMU Cybersecurity Engineering alumnus and former CYSE adjunct professor who currently works at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an Amazon Dedicated Cloud Engineer (ACDE) on the EC2 team. In this role, he maintains, scales, and secures isolated compute infrastructure within restricted environments to provide reliable virtual server capabilities for sovereign government customers. He earned his B.S. in Cybersecurity Engineering from George Mason University in 2019 and his M.S. in Cybersecurity from Georgia Tech in 2022. He is currently pursuing an MBA at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and serves as Executive Director of the Mijo Foundation.

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