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

Credential theft

Similar to on-premises AD, in AAD, identities are also the new perimeter and are very valuable to an adversary. As technology, as well as code review and secure coding processes, has drastically improved over the years, zero-day vulnerabilities are still a thing, but it is incredibly hard to spot them and to find a way to abuse them. Therefore, adversaries target the weakest link – the users, aka identities.

In this section, we will explore different ways that adversaries can steal AAD users’ identities and act in their name.

Token theft

One of the most common scenarios spotted in the wild is token theft. Token theft is a common attack vector in AAD, and it occurs when an attacker gains access to a user’s session token, authentication token, or session cookies. These tokens, such as refresh tokens and access tokens, can then be used to gain unauthorized access to the user’s account and sensitive information.

When we are talking...