Book Image

PowerShell Automation and Scripting for Cybersecurity

By : Miriam C. Wiesner
5 (2)
Book Image

PowerShell Automation and Scripting for Cybersecurity

5 (2)
By: Miriam C. Wiesner

Overview of this book

Take your cybersecurity skills to the next level with this comprehensive guide to PowerShell security! Whether you’re a red or blue teamer, you’ll gain a deep understanding of PowerShell’s security capabilities and how to use them. After revisiting PowerShell basics and scripting fundamentals, you’ll dive into PowerShell Remoting and remote management technologies. You’ll learn how to configure and analyze Windows event logs and understand the most important event logs and IDs to monitor your environment. You’ll dig deeper into PowerShell’s capabilities to interact with the underlying system, Active Directory and Azure AD. Additionally, you’ll explore Windows internals including APIs and WMI, and how to run PowerShell without powershell.exe. You’ll uncover authentication protocols, enumeration, credential theft, and exploitation, to help mitigate risks in your environment, along with a red and blue team cookbook for day-to-day security tasks. Finally, you’ll delve into mitigations, including Just Enough Administration, AMSI, application control, and code signing, with a focus on configuration, risks, exploitation, bypasses, and best practices. By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of how to employ PowerShell from both a red and blue team perspective.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: PowerShell Fundamentals
6
Part 2: Digging Deeper – Identities, System Access, and Day-to-Day Security Tasks
12
Part 3: Securing PowerShell – Effective Mitigations In Detail

Part 1: PowerShell Fundamentals

In this part, we are revisiting the PowerShell fundamentals necessary for getting started with PowerShell for cybersecurity. We will begin by reviewing the basics, including Object-Oriented Programming principles, the differences between Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core, the fundamental concepts of PowerShell, as well as the security features introduced in each PowerShell version.

Next, we’ll explore the essential foundations of PowerShell scripting. By the end of this part, you will have the skills to write PowerShell scripts utilizing various control structures, variables, and operators, enabling you to create reusable code efficiently.

You will also explore how to configure and utilize remote management technologies, with a special focus on PowerShell Remoting. You will gain insights into the security-specific facts and best practices regarding PowerShell Remoting and authentication.

Finally, we will look into PowerShell-related...