barq vs MadKing Amazon Web Services Attack Platform: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

barq

Red team operators and cloud security engineers testing AWS infrastructure will find barq invaluable for post-exploitation scenarios that standard tooling can't reach, particularly lateral movement across EC2 instances without relying on SSH keypairs or stored credentials. The 387 GitHub stars and active exploitation framework design signal serious adoption among practitioners who need to validate AWS misconfigurations that detection tools often miss. Skip this if your team runs only managed AWS services or lacks the operational maturity to safely sandbox post-exploitation activity; barq assumes you already control initial access and know what you're doing with the blast radius.

MadKing Amazon Web Services Attack Platform

Security teams building AWS red team capabilities or training junior penetration testers should use MadKing Amazon Web Services Attack Platform to learn real attack chains without building proof-of-concepts from scratch. The project documents actual AWS exploitation techniques across IAM, networking, and data exfiltration with runnable code, cutting weeks off internal lab setup. Skip this if your organization needs a polished, vendor-supported tool with incident response workflows; MadKing is a learning resource with 39 GitHub stars, not a production offensive security platform.