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

Microsoft baselines and the security compliance toolkit

To help with the hardening of organizations’ environments, Microsoft released the Security Compliance Toolkit. Download the Security Compliance Toolkit from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=55319.

This toolkit contains the following:

  • Policy Analyzer: A tool to evaluate and compare Group Policies.
  • LGPO.exe: A tool to analyze local policies.
  • SetObjectSecurity.exe: A tool to configure security descriptors for almost every Windows security object.
  • Baselines for each recent operating system: These baselines contain monitoring as well as configuration recommendations.

You can find an overview of all security baseline GPOs if you open the respective GP Reports folder of each baseline:

Figure 6.14 – Overview of all GPOs of a single baseline

Figure 6.14 – Overview of all GPOs of a single baseline

All security baselines were created for different configuration purposes. Some of the most important...