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

PowerShell Is Powerful – System and API Access

Just when you thought PowerShell was already a mighty tool, get ready to be surprised by its ability to delve deep into the system. In this chapter, we’ll explore accessing the system and API by using PowerShell.

We’ll start by looking into the Windows Registry and how you can leverage PowerShell to easily access its keys and values. We’ll then move on to .NET Framework and the Windows API, and you’ll learn how to execute C# code directly from PowerShell.

Next, we’ll explore Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which can be used to access and manage a wide range of system resources, including hardware, software, network components, and other objects, through a standard interface. PowerShell makes it easy to interact with WMI and automate tasks and manipulate data.

In this chapter, you will also learn how it is possible to run PowerShell commands without executing powershell.exe. You...