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

Attack detection – Endpoint Detection and Response

Another really important point is to have a product in place to detect attacks and react to them. There are many great products out there that can help you with this task. Make sure that the product of your choice also supports PowerShell and helps you detect suspicious commands that were launched via PowerShell and other command-line tools.

Microsoft’s solution, for example, is called Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. But other vendors provide similar solutions.

Enabling free features from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Even if you do not use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, various features are free to use without any subscription:

  • Hardware-based isolation/Application Guard
  • Attack surface reduction rules
  • Controlled folder access
  • Removable storage protection
  • Network protection
  • Exploit Guard
  • Windows Defender Firewall with advanced security

Many of these features can even...