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

Understanding the Component Object Model (COM) and COM hijacking

COM is a binary standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993, which defines a set of rules for how software components interact with each other and allows inter-process communication. It was developed by Microsoft to address the need for interoperability between applications.

COM is the basis of many other technologies, such as OLE, COM+, DCOM, ActiveX, Windows User Interface, Windows Runtime, and many others. Basically, COM is just middleware that sits between two components and allows them to communicate with each other.

One example of how COM is used can be demonstrated with how Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) works: if you want to include, for example, an Excel table in your PowerPoint presentation. Usually, to allow this, without COM, PowerPoint would need to have the actual code implemented that makes Excel work how it works. But since this would be a waste of resources and redundant...