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

What are language modes within PowerShell?

A language mode in PowerShell determines which elements of PowerShell are allowed and can be used in a session. You can find out the language mode of the current session by running $ExecutionContext.SessionState.LanguageMode—of course, this only works if you are allowed to run this command:

Figure 10.1 – Querying the language mode

Figure 10.1 – Querying the language mode

In the example shown in the screenshot, the Full Language mode is enabled in the current session.

There are four different language modes available, which we will explore a little bit deeper in the following sections.

Full Language (FullLanguage)

The Full Language mode is the default mode for PowerShell. Every command and all elements are allowed.

The only restrictions that a user may experience would be if they do not have the Windows privileges to run a command (such as administrative privileges), but this behavior is not restricted by language mode.

Restricted...