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

Working remotely with PowerShell

PowerShell was designed to automate administration tasks and simplify the lives of system administrators. Remote management was a part of this plan from the very beginning, as outlined by Jeffrey Snover in the Monad Manifesto from 2002: https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/. However, to ship version 1.0 promptly, some features, including PSRemoting, were not included until later versions. PSRemoting was officially introduced in version 2.0 and further improved in version 3.0.

It quickly became one of the most important core functionalities and nowadays supports many other functions within PowerShell, such as workflows.

While PSRemoting can work with a variety of authentication methods, the default protocol for domain authentication is Kerberos. This is the most secure and commonly used method of authentication in Active Directory environments, which is where most people using PSRemoting are likely to be operating. So, when Kerberos...