DevOps
DevOps is an overall strategy used to promote consistency and automation.
In particular, Devops applies to management of software builds,
system changes and infrastructure modifications
While a thorough exploration of DevOps is outside the scope of this module,
its helpful to recognize this trend
toward increasing
and improving process automation
in modern companies.
DevOps technologies make traditional infrastructure and configuration tasks
much more streamlined and efficient.
They can quickly make configuration changes or system deployments
that would have taken much more time.
In some cases, these deployments are nearly instantaneous.
Due to the automated nature of these systems
and the impact they can have on system output
or corporate infrastructure,
they can be useful to an attacker
who wants to traverse internal networks.
DevOps mechanisms’ inherent purpose is reconfiguring systems,
especially by means of elevated privileges.
This makes them a valuable target
for exploitation.
There are many systems available that perform these sorts of functions.
Puppet and Chef are both popular,
but in this module we will take a closer look at Ansible,
which we’ve frequently encountered
in penetration testing engagements.