Headshot of Karl Fosaaen

Karl Fosaaen

VP, Research

As a VP of Research, Karl is part of a team developing new services and product offerings at NetSPI. Karl previously oversaw the Cloud Penetration Testing service lines at NetSPI and is one of the founding members of NetSPI's Portland, OR team. Karl has a Bachelors of Computer Science from the University of Minnesota and has been in the security consulting industry for 15 years. Karl spends most of his research time focusing on Azure security and contributing to the NetSPI blog. As part of this research, Karl created the MicroBurst toolkit to house many of the PowerShell tools that he uses for testing Azure. In 2021, Karl co-authored the book "Penetration Testing Azure for Ethical Hackers" with David Okeyode.

More by Karl Fosaaen

Cloud Pentesting

Backdooring Azure Automation Account Packages and Runtime Environments 

Azure Automation Accounts can allow an attacker to persist in the associated packages that support runbooks. Learn how attackers can maintain access to an Automation Account.

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Cloud Pentesting

Extracting Managed Identity Certificates from the Azure Arc Service 

The Azure Arc service is handy for bringing on-prem systems to the cloud, but it includes features that could lead to pivots from on-prem into your Azure environment.

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Security Magazine: Closing the cloud skills gap as adoption grows

NetSPI's VP of Research, Karl Fosaaen, weighs in on addressing the cybersecurity skills gap to avoid data security risks during cloud migrations.

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Cloud Pentesting

Azure Deployment Scripts: Assuming User-Assigned Managed Identities

Learn how to use Deployment Scripts to complete faster privilege escalation with Azure User-Assigned Managed Identities.

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Cloud Pentesting

Extracting Sensitive Information from the Azure Batch Service 

The added power and scalability of Batch Service helps users run workloads significantly faster, but misconfigurations can unintentionally expose sensitive data.

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Cloud Pentesting

Automating Managed Identity Token Extraction in Azure Container Registries

Learn the processes used to create a malicious Azure Container Registry task that can be used to export tokens for Managed Identities attached to an ACR.

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Cloud Pentesting

Mistaken Identity: Extracting Managed Identity Credentials from Azure Function Apps 

NetSPI explores extracting managed identity credentials from Azure Function Apps to expose sensitive data.

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Videos & Livestreams

Azure Cloud Security Pentesting Skills

At Black Hat, NetSPI VP of Research Karl Fosaaen sat down with the host of the Cloud Security Podcast Ashish Rajan to discuss all things Azure penetration testing. Give the video a watch and then head over to NetSPI's Azure Penetration Testing service to learn more.

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Personnel Development

NetSPI’s Dark Side Ops Courses: Evolving Cybersecurity Excellence

Check out our evolved Dark Side Operations courses with a fully virtual model to evolve your cybersecurity skillset.

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Cloud Pentesting

Escalating Privileges with Azure Function Apps

Explore how undocumented APIs used by the Azure Function Apps Portal menu allowed for directory traversal on the Function App containers.

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Cloud Pentesting

Pivoting with Azure Automation Account Connections

Discover a helpful function for enumerating potential pivot points from an existing Azure Automation Account with Contributor level access.

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Cloud Pentesting

How to Gather Azure App Configurations

Learn how to gather access keys for App Configuration resources and how to use those keys to access the configuration key-value pairs.

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