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 familiar with the Windows Registry

The Windows Registry was introduced with Windows 3.1. Although back then, it primarily stored information for the COM-based components, it was developed over the years. Nowadays, it serves as the hierarchical database as we all know it – storing low-level configuration settings for the Windows operating system, as well as for applications running on it.

Although you can access the registry using multiple ways, we will concentrate in this section on how to access and operate the registry using PowerShell.

The Windows Registry of modern systems usually consists of five root keys. Each of them has their own purpose and contains different settings:

  • HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (HKCR): Hives underneath this root key contain information about COM class registration information and file associations.
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER (HKCU): Contains settings that are specific to the user that is currently logged on. Technically, this root key is just...