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

PowerShell endpoints (session configurations)

In this chapter, you might have read the term endpoint several times.

If we are talking about endpoints, we are not talking about one computer: PSRemoting is designed to work with multiple endpoints on a computer.

But what exactly is an endpoint?

When we are talking about PowerShell endpoints, each endpoint is a session configuration, which you can configure to offer certain services or which you can also restrict.

So, every time we run Invoke-Command or enter a PowerShell session, we are connecting to an endpoint (also known as a remote session configuration).

Sessions that offer fewer cmdlets, functions, and features, as those that are usually available if no restrictions are in place, are called constrained endpoints.

Before we enable PSRemoting, no endpoint will have been configured on the computer.

You can see all the available session configurations by running the Get-PSSessionConfiguration command:

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