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 remoting authentication and security considerations

PSRemoting traffic is encrypted by default – regardless of whether a connection was initiated via HTTP or HTTPS. The underlying protocol that’s used is WS-Man, which is decoupled to allow it to be used more broadly. PSRemoting uses an authentication protocol, such as Kerberos or NTLM, to authenticate the session traffic, and SSL/TLS is used to encrypt the session traffic, regardless of whether the connection was initiated via HTTP or HTTPS.

But similar to every other computer, PSRemoting is only as secure as the computer that’s been configured. And if you don’t secure your administrator’s credentials, an attacker can extract and use them against you.

Therefore, you should also put effort into hardening your infrastructure and securing your most valuable identities. You will learn more about Active Directory security and credential hygiene in Chapter 6, Active Directory – Attacks...