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

Best practices – avoiding risks and possible bypasses

JEA is a great option to harden your environment and allow administrators and users to only execute the commands that they need for their daily work. But as with every other technology, JEA can also be misconfigured, and there are risks that you need to watch out for.

Do not grant the connecting user admin privileges to bypass JEA—for example, allowing commands to edit admin groups such as Add-ADGroupMember, Add-LocalGroupMember, net.exe, and dsadd.exe. Rogue administrators or accounts that were compromised could easily escalate their privileges.

Also, don’t allow users to run arbitrary code, such as malware, exploits, or custom scripts to bypass protections. Commands that you should especially watch out for are (not exclusively) Start-Process, New-Service, Invoke-Item, Invoke-WmiMethod, Invoke-CimMethod, Invoke-Expression, Invoke-Command, New-ScheduledTask, Register-ScheduledJob, and many more.

If...