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

Privileged accounts and groups

A privileged account is an account that has more rights and privileges than a normal account and therefore needs to be cared especially for their security.

Built-in privileged accounts also exist in AD, such as the administrator account, the Guest account, the HelpAssistant account, and the krbtgt account (which is responsible for Kerberos operations).

If you want to read more about AD built-in accounts, please refer to the official documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-ds/manage/understand-default-user-accounts.

Built-in privileged groups in AD

In AD, there are some predefined roles such as the Enterprise or Domain Administrator roles, but those are not the only ones.

Those predefined roles reside in the Builtin container of your domain. To query it you can use the Get-ADGroup cmdlet and specify the Distinguished Name (DN) of your domain-specific Builtin container as -Searchbase; using this parameter...