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 roles

Privileged accounts and roles are the heart of any directory service and are the most powerful accounts/roles. Therefore, they are of special interest to adversaries and need an extra level of protection.

There are lots of built-in roles available in AAD. In this chapter, I won’t describe all of them, but will give you an overview of some important roles that have permissions that could be easily abused. Therefore, it makes sense to regularly check and audit which accounts do have those roles assigned:

  • Global Administrator: This is the most powerful role in AAD. It is allowed to perform every administrative task that is possible within AAD.
  • Privileged Role Administrator: This role can manage and assign all AAD roles, including the Global Administrator role. This role can also create and manage groups that can be assigned to AAD roles, as well as manage Privileged Identity Management and administrative units.
  • Global Reader: This...