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

Attacking AAD

During an attack, enumeration is always one of the first steps (and repeated several times, depending on what the adversary can access) taken to get more details about an environment. Enumeration helps to find out what resources are available and what access rights can be abused.

While in AD, every user who has access to the corporate network can enumerate all user accounts, as well as admin membership, in AAD, every user who has access to Office 365 services via the internet can enumerate them, but for AAD.

Anonymous enumeration

There is even a way to find out more about the current AAD tenant anonymously. For an adversary, this has huge advantages, as they do not need to trick a user into providing their credentials through a phishing attack or similar. Also, the risk of being detected is massively decreased.

There are numerous APIs that do have a legit purpose, but can also be abused for anonymous enumeration.

One of those APIs is the following:

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