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

Phases of an attack

When it comes to an attack, the same pattern is usually repeated over and over again. These phases are also reflected when it comes to a professional penetration test, which is performed by red teamers.

The following diagram illustrates the phases of an attack:

Figure 8.1 – Phases of an attack

Figure 8.1 – Phases of an attack

In the first phase, known as reconnaissance, the red teamer tries to get as much information as possible about the target. Once this phase has been completed, vulnerabilities are identified (vulnerability identification) that can be used for exploitation and getting access to the target.

Once a target has been successfully exploited, usually, credentials are collected, which can be used for lateral movement and to collect even more identities. Part of post-exploitation is to gain persistence, which means that the red teamer can reconnect without the need to exploit vulnerabilities once more.

Lateral movement can also occur by finding...