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

How attacks work in a corporate environment

Attacks in corporate environments usually all follow the same pattern.

To get access to a corporate environment, the adversary usually sends a phishing email or finds a vulnerability on an external-facing server. The latter is not that easy if the company followed best practices in securing their environment (for example, by putting their web servers in a demilitarized zone (DMZ), using Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), and following secure coding best practices).

In case you are unfamiliar with what a WAF is, it is a type of firewall that is specifically designed to protect web applications. It monitors and filters traffic between a web application and the internet, detecting and blocking attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. By using a WAF, companies can significantly reduce the risk of attackers exploiting vulnerabilities in their web applications.

Therefore, the easiest and weakest link is the...