CARTP - Review

The Certified Azure Red Team Professional (CARTP) by Altered Security is a beginner-friendly course for anyone who's looking to get started with Azure Security. The course lab simulates a multi-tenant environment that covers multiple kill chains (Attack Paths).

The course is delivered in 2 formats

The Lab

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I purchased the boot camp version of the course. Since I find it includes 4 Live sessions with Nikhil Mittal. It's always beneficial to directly interact with the course instructor. As a plus point, Nikhil does even share how these attacks were seen and could be exploited in the real-world environment as well.

The lab contained 4 different kill chains that go hand in hand with the training modules and lab objectives and a CTF at the end of these 4 kill chains.

The Lab contained multiple resources like VMs, Keyvaults, Deployment Templates, Storage Blobs, Function Applications, Enterprise Applications, Automation Accounts, etc. The course like other Altered Security Courses focused on feature abuses, rather than exploiting patchable vulnerabilities.

I specifically found the section that covered Illicit-Grant Access extremely interesting. The Lab also covers CAE and bypasses some Conditional Access Policies. Although the prerequisites do mention understanding the basics of Azure, I dived into the course with zero knowledge. The course covered all that is required starting from the basics, to abusing the features and misconfiguration and Defenses. Since the lab is a live Azure environment if feel that I'll be able to use the skills gained by this course in my professional life.

The Exam

The exam is a multi-tenant environment with various resources. The exam is neither too easy nor too difficult, rather it is pretty straightforward. Once we have compromised all the resources and submit a final report with detailed steps to reproduce and practical mitigations.

The Exam was pretty straightforward and had almost no intentional "Rabbit Holes". This being said, do not expect this to a an exam where one can simply copy-paste the commands. Researching to a certain small level is required. Knowing how Azure and Azure AD work was the key factor in the exam.

Following are some of the resources that helped me during my learning phase and acted as a cheatsheet during my exam.

  • https://cloud.hacktricks.xyz/welcome/readme
  • https://azure.permissions.cloud/