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

Exploring Desired State Configuration

PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a feature that enables you to manage your servers using PowerShell configuration as code.

At the time of writing, the following versions of DSC are available that you can use for deployment: DSC 1.1, DSC 2.0, and DSC 3.0.

While DSC 1.1 was included in Windows PowerShell 5.1, in DSC 2.0, which must run DSC on PowerShell 7.2 and above, PSDesiredStateConfiguration is no longer included in the PowerShell package. This enables the DSC creators to develop DSC independently of PowerShell and enables users to upgrade DSC without the need to upgrade PowerShell as well.

DSC 1.1

DSC 1.1 is included in Windows and updated through Windows Management Framework. It runs in Windows PowerShell 5.1. This is the go-to version if Azure Automanage Machine Configuration is not in use.

Remediation

DSC 1.1 has two configuration modes:

  • Push: The configuration is pushed manually
  • Pull: The nodes...