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

Hardening systems and environments

In the end, you can harden PowerShell as much as you like; if the systems on which PowerShell is running are not protected, adversaries will make use of that if they have the chance. Therefore, it is important to also look at how you can harden the security of your infrastructure.

Security baselines

A great start to hardening your Windows systems – regardless of the server, domain controller, or client – are the so-called security baselines provided by Microsoft. These security baselines are part of Microsoft’s Security Compliance Toolkit (SCT) 1.0, which can be downloaded from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=55319.

Please be careful when applying security baselines!

You should never just apply a security baseline to a running production system. Before applying it, carefully audit your settings and evaluate them. Then, work on a plan to enroll your changes. Many settings are included...