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

Getting started with logging

To improve your detection, it makes sense to set up a SIEM system for event collection so that you have all event logs in one place, allowing you to hunt and even build automated alerting.

There are many options if you want to choose a SIEM system – for every budget and scenario. Over the years, I have seen many different SIEM systems – and each one just fitted perfectly for each organization.

The most popular SIEM systems that I have seen out in the wild were Splunk, Azure Sentinel, ArcSight, qRadar, and the “ELK stack” (Elastic, LogStash, and Kibana), just to mention a few. I also saw and used Windows Event Forwarding (WEF) to realize event log monitoring.

Of course, it is also possible to analyze events on a local machine, but it is not practical – depending on the configuration, if the maximum log size is reached, old events are deleted, and you cannot easily correlate them with logs from another system.

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