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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to get started when working with PowerShell for cybersecurity. You obtained a high-level understanding of OOP and its four main principles. You learned what properties and methods are and how they apply to an object.

You now understand how to install the latest version of PowerShell Core and understand how to perform some basic tasks such as working with the history, clearing the screen, and canceling commands.

You have learned that Execution Policy is only a feature that keeps you from running scripts unintentionally, and it's important to understand that it is not a security control to prevent you from attackers.

You learned how to help yourself and obtain more information about cmdlets, functions, methods, and properties, using the help system.

Now that you have also found and installed your preferred PowerShell editor, you are ready to get started, learn about the PowerShell scripting fundamentals, and write your first scripts in the next chapter.