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

Best practices

To ensure optimal security and performance when using PSRemoting, it’s important to follow the best practices enforced by the product. These practices are designed to minimize the risk of security breaches and ensure that your remote management tasks run smoothly.

Authentication:

  • If possible, use only Kerberos or NTLM authentication.
  • Avoid CredSSP and basic authentication whenever possible.
  • In the best case, restrict the usage of all other authentication mechanisms besides Kerberos/NTLM.
  • SSH remoting – configure public key authentication and keep the private key protected.

Limit connections:

  • Limit connections via firewall from a management subnet (hardware and software if possible/available).

PSRemoting’s default firewall policies differ based on the network profile. In a Domain, Workgroup, or Private network profile, PSRemoting is available to all by default (assuming they have valid credentials). In...