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

Basics of the Windows API

The Windows Application Programming Interface (API), also known as Win32 or WinAPI, is a collection of libraries, functions, and interfaces that provide low-level access to various features and components of the Windows operating system. It allows developers direct access to system features and hardware, simplifying access to deeper layers of the operating system. The Windows API functions are written in C/C++ and are exposed by DLL files (such as kernel32.dll or user32.dll).

The Windows API is implemented as a collection of dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) that are loaded into memory when an application needs to use them. These DLLs contain the functions and procedures that make up the API. When an application calls a function from the API, it is essentially sending a message to the operating system to perform a certain task. The operating system then executes the appropriate function from the appropriate DLL and returns the result to the application.

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