Part 2: Digging Deeper – Identities, System Access, and Day-to-Day Security Tasks

Let’s dive deeper and combine PowerShell with other technologies. The technology section of this part mostly explores the ways that attackers can enumerate, bypass, hijack, and compromise key components such as the operating system itself, Active Directory, and Azure AD/Entra ID. On July 11, 2023 Microsoft renamed Azure AD to Entra ID. As this was just shortly announced before this book was released, we will refer to Entra ID just as Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, or AAD in this part. This part is not only of interest to red teamers but also to blue teamers who want to learn how adversaries are trying to abuse well-established solutions in order to protect themselves from such attacks. Additionally, you will get a lot of useful extra information about concepts, protocols, and mitigation, and many more interesting insights.

We’ll first explore PowerShell’s capabilities...