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 PowerShell Remote Management Technologies and PowerShell Remoting

As one of the main purposes of PowerShell is automating administration tasks, PowerShell remoting (PSRemoting) plays a big part in administrating multiple computers at the same time: using only a single command, you can run the same command line on hundreds of computers.

But similar to when you work with individual computers, PSRemoting is only as secure as your configuration: if you don’t lock the door of your house, burglars can break into it.

And that’s the same case for computers, as well as for PSRemoting: if you don’t harden your configuration and use insecure settings, attackers can leverage that and use your computers against you.

In this chapter, you will not only learn the basics of PSRemoting and how to enable and configure it – you will also discover the best practices for maintaining a secure PSRemoting configuration. While PSRemoting is inherently secure, there...