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

Common Information Model (CIM)/WMI

We already learned in Chapter 3, Exploring PowerShell Remote Management Technologies and PowerShell Remoting, that WMI is Microsoft’s implementation of the CIM, and how to use WMI- or CIM-related PowerShell cmdlets.

In this chapter, we are exploring WMI a little bit further in the system context.

WMI is not a new technology, and WMI attacks are not a new attack vector. WMI only produces a small forensic footprint, runs in memory only, and is a great way to evade whitelisting as well as host-based security tools. Therefore, WMI has been weaponized in attacks in recent years like never before.

In general, applications such as PowerShell, .NET, C/C++, VBScript, and many more can access WMI through the WMI API. The CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) then manages the access between each WMI component. The communication relies on COM/DCOM.

The following figure demonstrates the architecture of WMI:

Figure 5.25 – WMI architecture

Figure 5.25 –...