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

Exploring .NET Framework

.NET Framework is a software framework developed by Microsoft that provides a wide range of functionalities for building and running applications. It is a default part of every Windows installation since Windows Vista. One of the framework’s key features is the ability to access system and API resources, making it a powerful tool.

.NET Framework consists of two main components:

  • Common Language Runtime (CLR):

This is the runtime engine for .NET; it also contains a Just in Time (JIT) compiler, which translates bytecode in Common Intermediate Language (CIL) to the underlying compiler to turn it into machine code that can execute on the specific architecture of the computer it is running on.

The CLR also includes thread management, a garbage collector, type safety, code access security, exception handling, and more.

Every .NET Framework version comes with its own CLR.

  • .NET Framework Class Library (FCL):

The FCL is a...