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

Controlling applications and scripts

An application control solution not only protects against unauthorized PowerShell scripts; it can also be used to define which applications, executables, and DLLs are allowed to run in the environment.

It is important to keep in mind that while PowerShell attacks may seem like a concern for many professionals, they represent a relatively small portion of the malware that makes its way onto systems. It is essential to not overlook the danger posed by traditional executable and DLL attacks.

Application control solutions often provide a possibility to also just prohibit single unwanted applications, but the desired outcome should always be to prohibit everything and configure all allowed applications. As you may recall from Chapter 5, PowerShell Is Powerful – System and API Access, even if you block PowerShell.exe in your environment, it is still possible to run it by just using the native API functions, irrespective of whether it makes...