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

Preventing unauthorized script execution with code signing

If you want to verify that the executed script is legit code and is allowed to be executed by your company, you want to implement a proper code-signing strategy. It’s a brilliant way to protect your regularly executed scripts against tampering – or at least if someone were to tamper with your scripts, they would not be executed if your environment is configured in the right way.

It’s important to note that dynamic runtimes can pose a common blind spot when implementing application control policies. While PowerShell made a significant impact to ensure that the PowerShell runtime can be restricted by application control rules, other dynamic runtimes such as Python, Node, Perl, PHP, and more may still allow you to run unrestricted code, which might present a vulnerability if it’s not managed appropriately. If other dynamic runtimes are not needed on your clients, it’s better to block them...