What is GCP penetration testing?
GCP penetration testing is the practice of assessing a Google Cloud environment for weaknesses an attacker could exploit, covering both the configuration of the cloud itself and the applications running on it. It asks what is genuinely reachable and exploitable, not merely what differs from a baseline.
It matters most for teams whose production estate has grown organically: projects created for a trial and never closed, service accounts issued broad roles to unblock a deployment, buckets opened for a migration. Those are the paths that turn a small mistake into real access.
Posture audit and penetration testing are different jobs
A posture audit reads your configuration through the provider API and reports where it diverges from a benchmark. A penetration test tries to reach something. Both are useful, and they answer different questions: one tells you a bucket is public, the other tells you what is in it and whether it leads anywhere.
PentestOps runs both against GCP. The configuration audit is agentless and read-only. The testing of anything you expose to the internet from GCP runs as part of external network penetration testing and web application testing, gated by your Rules of Engagement.
What the GCP audit covers
Google Cloud is one of the four providers covered by the 800+ automated configuration checks, alongside AWS, Azure and Microsoft 365. Each cloud account you connect counts as one asset.
| Area | Examples of what is reviewed |
|---|---|
| Identity and access | IAM bindings, primitive roles, service account keys, impersonation paths |
| Storage | Bucket-level and object-level access, public exposure, retention settings |
| Network | VPC firewall rules, external addresses, open management ports |
| Compute and containers | Instance and workload configuration, container image provenance |
| Logging and monitoring | Audit log configuration and coverage gaps |
| Key management | Key rotation and access to key material |
Google Kubernetes Engine
If you run GKE, cluster auditing is agentless too: you supply a read-only kubeconfig and the platform reviews RBAC, workload security context, privileged and host pods, network policy and image provenance across 83 API and RBAC checks.
On GKE Standard the node-level CIS Kubernetes Benchmark runs as a short-lived, automatically cleaned job. On GKE Autopilot, where host-level pods are not permitted, node and control-plane CIS coverage is routed through the cloud configuration audit instead. See Kubernetes security testing for the full picture.
Testing rules and authorisation
Google publishes a customer support policy covering penetration testing of your own cloud resources. It generally does not require you to notify Google in advance to test projects you control, but the policy and its scope change, so confirm the current version before you begin.
Within PentestOps, every scan and every exploitation attempt is gated by your signed Rules of Engagement. Scope enforcement stops activity the moment it would leave the assets you authorised, and everything is recorded in the evidence trail.
Why teams run GCP testing here
- One report covering cloud configuration, the applications you host, and the identities behind both, instead of three tools that do not talk.
- Findings mapped to the CIS Google Cloud Benchmark and to 8 compliance reporting frameworks.
- Agentless connection with read-only credentials. Nothing is installed in your projects.
- Asset-wise pricing: a cloud account is one asset, and scans against it are unlimited within fair use.
- Australian-built and operated, with customer data stored in Australia.