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

Common PowerShell red team tools

Many tools have been released that are written in PowerShell that can help you with your red team engagements – too many for you to make use of every single one. In this section, we will look at some of the most well-known and helpful tools to get you started and provide you with an overview of what is out there to help.

PowerSploit

PowerSploit is a collection of PowerShell modules and scripts that can help red teamers during a penetration testing engagement. It was originally developed by Matt Graeber. It is no longer supported, but there are still many useful tools and scripts that are helpful. PowerSploit can be downloaded from GitHub: https://github.com/PowerShellMafia/PowerSploit.

While most functions work fine in Windows PowerShell, they don’t in PowerShell 7 and above. Some functionalities that PowerSploit made use of from .NET Framework were not ported into .NET Core, on which PowerShell 7 relies. So, when running PowerSploit...