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

Configuring PowerShell Event Logging

Implementing robust auditing mechanisms for PowerShell to help you monitor, detect and prevent potential threats is an essential step to ensure effective security practices for PowerShell. By leveraging PowerShell logging, you can capture detailed information about PowerShell activities on your systems, which is essential for detecting and investigating security incidents. PowerShell logging can help you identify suspicious activities, such as the execution of malicious commands or the modification of critical system settings.

In this section, we will discuss the different types of PowerShell logging that you can enable, including PowerShell Module Logging, PowerShell Script Block Logging, Protected Event Logging, and PowerShell transcripts. We will also look into how to configure these logging features to meet your organization’s specific security requirements.

PowerShell Module Logging

PowerShell Module Logging was added with PowerShell...