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

Enumerating groups

Understanding which user accounts are part of which group is very valuable information for an attacker. Through this, they can quickly understand whether certain accounts might have access to other computers.

But this is also a task that blue teamers should pursue on a regular basis; often, systems and access rights are not hardened enough, so it is valuable to understand which users are part of which AD group and to adjust it.

In the longer term, it also makes sense to implement monitoring to immediately get alerted if an AD group membership changes that was not intended.

To get started enumerating your AD groups, I have written a simple script for you, which displays the groups, as well as their members: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/PowerShell-Automation-and-Scripting-for-Cybersecurity/blob/master/Chapter06/Get-UsersAndGroups.ps1.

Once you’ve downloaded the script, you can either use it and progress the output further as a PowerShell object...