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

Enabling PowerShell remoting

There are different ways to enable PSRemoting for your system(s). If you only work with a few machines in your lab, you might want to enable it manually. But as soon as you want to enable PSRemoting in a big environment, you might want to enable and configure PSRemoting centrally. In this section, we will have a look at both methods. The following table provides an overview of which method takes which configuration actions:

Table 3.2 – Enabling PSRemoting – different methods

Table 3.2 – Enabling PSRemoting – different methods

Please note that the Enable-PSRemoting method is a subpart of the manual configuration; to configure HTTP and HTTPS listeners, additional steps must be taken. Let’s explore what is needed to manually configure PSRemoting, which could be useful in a test scenario, for example.

Enabling PowerShell remoting manually

If you want to enable PSRemoting on a single machine, this can be done manually by using the Enable-PSRemoting command...