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

Introduction to Active Directory from a security point of view

Active Directory (AD) is a directory service that you can use to manage your Windows-based networks. Released in 2000, AD quickly became the standard for enterprise identity management.

Using AD, you can arrange your computers, servers, and connected network devices using domains and organizational units. You can structure it within a hierarchy and use domains within the enterprise forest to separate different sub-areas from each other logically.

The domain or enterprise administrator roles are the most powerful roles within a domain or forest. While the domain administrator has full control over the domain they are managing, the enterprise administrator has full control over all domains within the forest, and even control over some additional forest-level attributes. Therefore, these roles should be assigned very wisely and carefully.

Most rights can also be delegated to fine-grain which role is allowed to do...