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

Summary

After reading this chapter, you should be familiar with how to use PowerShell remotely, using PSRemoting. You learned what options exist in PowerShell to establish remote connections, which enables you to not only manage Windows machines but also other operating systems, such as macOS and Linux.

You also learned what endpoints are and can create basic custom endpoints. You will strengthen this ability later in Chapter 10, Language Modes and Just Enough Administration (JEA), but you already know the basics.

Then, you learned a lot about authentication protocols that can be used and even more about security considerations when working with those protocols. You should also be aware of how easily an adversary can obtain decrypted credentials if a weak authentication protocol is used.

You should now be able to configure PSRemoting manually and centrally, which helps you set up your initial PSRemoting configuration in your production environment.

Last but not least, you...