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

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned some basics of AD security. As AD is a huge topic that would cover an entire book itself, we concentrated on AD security from a credential theft and access rights perspective.

You have learned how to implement some basic auditing checks and which open source tools can help you to enumerate AD.

You now know which accounts and groups are privileged in AD and that you should be very careful when delegating access rights. It is also not enough to just deploy AD out of the box; you also need to harden it.

Finally, we dived deep into the authentication protocols that are used within AD and also explored how they can be abused.

We have also discussed some mitigations, but make sure to also follow the advice in Chapter 13, What Else? – Further Mitigations and Resources.

But when we are talking about AD, AAD (or how it will be called in the future: Entra ID) is not far away. Although both services are amazing identity providers...