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 3: Securing PowerShell – Effective Mitigations In Detail

In this part, we will mostly concentrate on mitigations that can help you to secure your environment efficiently. However, again, although we will focus on a lot of blue team stuff, this section also helps red teamers understand how mitigation technologies work, what risks they contain, and how adversaries are attempting to develop bypasses.

First, we’ll explore Just Enough Administration (JEA), a feature that helps with delegating administrative tasks to non-administrative users. Although this feature is not very well known widely, it can be a game-changer. In this part, we will dive deep into JEA and its configuration options, and we will learn how to simplify the initial deployment.

Next, we will look into code signing and Application Control. You will learn how to plan for deploying Application Control, and throughout our journey, we will work with Microsoft’s Application Control solutions...