Pods Without Borders - Lateral Movement in Azure Kubernetes Service

Explore lateral movement techniques and security vulnerabilities in Azure Kubernetes Service environments through this 23-minute conference talk by Nishaanth Guna from fwd:cloudsec Europe 2025. Examine real-world Kubernetes security weaknesses discovered during enterprise and banking security assessments, focusing on how attackers can exploit compromised pods for data exfiltration and lateral movement. Learn about common misconfigurations in NetworkPolicy implementations, whether organizations effectively use Calico, Cilium, or other networking add-ons to protect critical assets, and understand the complex security challenges posed by cloud-native architectures with custom networking components like hubs, route tables, and network security groups. Discover the trade-offs between usability and security in cloud environments, and gain insights into monitoring various protocols including HTTP, DNS, and SMB. Acquire practical steps for hardening cloud infrastructure, explore a pragmatic approach to applying network-related policies in cloud environments, and access newly released open-source tools and vulnerable labs designed to help replicate and understand these security misconfigurations. Benefit from the expertise of Nishaanth Guna, a Senior Security Consultant at MDSec specializing in cloud and mobile application security, who brings extensive experience from testing diverse cloud and Kubernetes environments and has presented findings at major security conferences while holding CKA and CRTO certifications.