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

User rights

User rights play a huge role in corporate environments: you can, for example, configure who is allowed to log on to which system and who is allowed to do what. A misconfiguration can cause a serious risk of identity theft and lateral movement.

Adversaries can use it to find out which accounts are worthwhile to compromise to escalate their privileges.

You can find a detailed overview of all user rights in the official documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/security-policy-settings/user-rights-assignment.

I know the documentation is quite extensive and if you have no experience on user rights yet, you might quickly get lost. Therefore, let me explain some of the most important security-related user rights that I have often seen misconfigured.

Configuring access user rights

In general, log-on rights are always critical if too many users and or groups are allowed to access a sensitive system. Many default rights are...