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

Understanding PSDrives in PowerShell

PowerShell includes a feature called PowerShell drives (PSDrives). PSDrives in PowerShell are similar to filesystem drives in Windows, but instead of accessing files and folders, you use PSDrives to access a variety of data stores. These data stores can include directories, registry keys, and other data sources, which can be accessed through a consistent and familiar interface.

PSDrives are powered by PSProviders, which are the underlying components that provide access to data stores. PSProviders are similar to drivers in Windows, which allow access to different hardware devices. In the case of PowerShell, PSProviders allow you to access different data stores in a uniform way, using the same set of cmdlets and syntax.

For example, the Env:\ PSDrive is a built-in PowerShell drive that provides access to environment variables. To retrieve all environment variables that have the path string in their name, you can use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet...