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 is AMSI and how does it work?

AMSI is an interface that was designed to help with malware defense. Not only PowerShell but also other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript can profit from it. It also gives third-party and self-written applications the option to protect their users from dynamic malware. It was introduced with Windows 10/Windows Server 2016.

Currently, AMSI is supported for the following products:

  • PowerShell
  • Office Visual Basic for Applications macros
  • VBScript
  • Excel 4.0 (XLM) macros
  • Windows Management Instrumentation
  • Dynamically loaded .NET assemblies
  • JScript
  • MSHTA/JScript9
  • User Account Control
  • Windows Script Host (wscript.exe and cscript.exe)
  • Third-party products that support AMSI

Like other APIs, AMSI provides an interface to the Win32 API and the COM API. AMSI is an open standard so it is not limited to PowerShell only; any developer can develop their application accordingly to support AMSI, and any...