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

Summary

In this chapter, we explored how PowerShell provides access to various system and API resources such as the Windows Registry, Windows API (including COM and .NET Framework), and WMI. We also learned how to run PowerShell without the use of the powershell.exe executable.

The chapter provided many examples that demonstrated how red teamers or adversaries can exploit these APIs and resources. It was also intended to help blue teamers to gain insights into adversary behavior and learn how to leverage PowerShell to monitor and detect suspicious behavior by leveraging CIM events.

By the end of the chapter, you should have gained a better understanding of how PowerShell can be used to interact with system resources and APIs, as well as how to leverage it for both offensive and defensive purposes.

When we are talking about PowerShell security, authentication and identities play an important role. Let’s have a look at Active Directory security from a PowerShell perspective...