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

Part 2: Digging Deeper – Identities, System Access, and Day-to-Day Security Tasks

Let’s dive deeper and combine PowerShell with other technologies. The technology section of this part mostly explores the ways that attackers can enumerate, bypass, hijack, and compromise key components such as the operating system itself, Active Directory, and Azure AD/Entra ID. On July 11, 2023 Microsoft renamed Azure AD to Entra ID. As this was just shortly announced before this book was released, we will refer to Entra ID just as Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, or AAD in this part. This part is not only of interest to red teamers but also to blue teamers who want to learn how adversaries are trying to abuse well-established solutions in order to protect themselves from such attacks. Additionally, you will get a lot of useful extra information about concepts, protocols, and mitigation, and many more interesting insights.

We’ll first explore PowerShell’s capabilities...