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

In this chapter, you learned how to get started with security logging for PowerShell. You now know which event logs are of interest and which event IDs you should look for. As security monitoring is a huge topic, you have learned just the basics on how to get started and continue.

You learned how to configure PowerShell Module Logging, Script Block Logging, and PowerShell transcripts – manually and centralized for Windows PowerShell, as well as for PowerShell Core.

Another important learning point is that log events can be tampered with, and you can implement some level of protection using Protected Event Logging.

Eventually, it is best to forward your log events to a centralized SIEM system, but if that’s not possible, you also learned how to analyze events using PowerShell.

Now that you have been provided with some example scripts and code snippets, you are ready to investigate all PowerShell activity on your clients and servers.

Last but not...