Nothing is worse than finding your credentials or other confidential information in plain text on the network. While PowerShell cannot protect you against insecure web services, it can protect your credentials, connections strings, and so on as long as possible by supporting the Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS).
Currently only supported on the Windows operating system due to the certificate stores that are being used, the CMS allows you to securely pass information to other users or computers. The security of this is based on mathematical problems such as the prime factorization of large (4096 bit) numbers, or calculating coordinates on an elliptic curve. Or, in friendlier terms, public key cryptography.
