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

Differentiating between AD and AAD

A common misconception when comparing AD and AAD is that AAD is just AD in the cloud. This statement is not true.

While AD is the directory service for on-premises domains, AAD allows users to access Office 365, the Azure portal, SaaS applications, internal resources, and other cloud-based apps.

Both are identity and access management solutions, yes. But besides that, both technologies are very different, as you can see in the following figure:

Figure 7.1 – AD versus AAD

Figure 7.1 – AD versus AAD

AAD can sync with an on-premises AD (hybrid identity) and supports federation (e.g., through Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)) or can be used as a single identity and access provider. It supports different types of authentication, such as the following:

  • Cloud-only authentication: In this scenario, AAD acts as the sole IdP, without any synchronization with an on-premises AD. Users authenticate directly with AAD for access...