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

Accessing AAD using PowerShell

Of course, we all know the Azure portal; surely attackers can also take advantage of seamless SSO and access the portal using the user’s browser. There’s even a way to run code directly from the Azure portal using Azure Cloud Shell. But these methods are hard to automate and attackers would struggle to stay undetected. The following screenshot shows how Azure Cloud Shell can be run from the Azure portal:

Figure 7.6 – Using Azure Cloud Shell from the Azure portal

Figure 7.6 – Using Azure Cloud Shell from the Azure portal

But there are also some ways to access AAD using code or the command line directly from your computer:

Originally, these methods were developed to support automation and simplify administration tasks, but as usual, they can also be abused by attackers.

We will not dive deeper into Azure .NET in this chapter. Azure .NET is a set of...