Windows Security Automation and Threat Hunting with PowerShell Seminar

Location: 400 W Wisconsin Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53203, USA

Date: October 10, 2018 8:00am – 4:00pm

Duration: 8 hours

Audience: Cyber Security professionals and Windows administrators

Attendees Environment: Laptops not required, but suggested to have better hands-on absorption of subject matter.

Description:
PowerShell is both a command-line shell and scripting language. Fight fires quickly using existing or custom PowerShell commands or scripts at the shell. PowerShell is made for Security Operations (SecOps) automation on Windows. This seminar does not require prior programming skills. The seminar focuses on PowerShell programming, giving a beginner skills to be productive in windows scripting to automate tasks and also remediate problems.

Cyber Security is the objective of this seminar, and the PowerShell examples will demonstrate PowerShell capabilities that help lock down a Windows system and also report security status.

Objectives:

PowerShell Overview

• Getting started running commands
• Security cmdlets
• Using and updating the built-in help
• Execution policies
• Fun tricks with the ISE graphical editor
• Piping .NET and COM objects, not text
• Using properties and methods of objects
• Helping Linux admins feel more at home
• Aliases, cmdlets, functions, modules, etc.

PowerShell Utilities and Tips

• Customizing your profile script
• PowerShell remote command execution
• Security setting across the network
• File copy via PowerShell remoting
• Capturing the output of commands
• Parsing text files and logs with regex patterns
• Parsing Security Logs
• Searching remote event logs
• Mounting the registry as a drive
• Security settings in the Registry
• Exporting data to CSV, HTML and JSON files
• Running scripts as scheduled jobs
• Continued Security Compliance
• Pushing out scripts through Group Policy
• Importing modules and dot-sourcing functions
• http://www.PowerShellGallery.com

PowerShell Scripting

• PowerShell Scripting to implement Security Practices
• Writing your own functions to automate security status and settings
• Passing arguments into your scripts
• Function parameters and returning output
• Flow control: if-then, foreach, that make security decisions
• How to pipe data in/out of your scripts for security compliance and reporting

Attendees to this seminar, Windows Security Automation and Threat Hunting with PowerShell, will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.[/wr_text][/wr_column][/wr_row]

Working with the TechNow lab for the PA-215: Palo Alto Networks Firewall Essentials FastTrack course has been nothing less than a techie's idea of fun.  When students come in we are immediatly configuring the Cisco 3750 switches for access ports, VLANS, and trunks.  We then cable the switch to the Palo Alto Networks Firewall.  Each student gets their own Palo Alto Firewall Pod of hardware and software.  What we find as fun is the VLAN environment, with an array of virtual machines hosted on an ESXi server that can really exercise the abilities of the Palo Alto Firewall.  The DMZ VLAN hosts virtual machines that support enterprise services and also potentialy vulnerable web services.  The Trust VLAN has Windows and Linux clients.  The UnTrust VLAN has Web services and a VM of Kali. The hardware Firewall is additionally connected to a Management VLAN.  All those VLANs are trunked into an ESXi server where the student also has a VM-Series Palo Alto Networks Firewall for High Availability.  

After configuring all the trunking, VLANs, and network interfaces we learn about the firewall and configure it for the lab environment.  Using Metasploitable and Kali/Metasploit nefarious penetration attempts are executed.  Using packet captures, custom APP-ID's  and custom signatures are generated.  Custom logging and reporting are created to similate and enterprise and assist the desired Incident Response.  It is always fun in a training environment to learn all about the controls available in a product, even though specific controls may not be used in the operational environment.  In the end we have a good understanding of the Palo Alto Networks Firewall.

TechNow has heard many students talk about virtualized/remote training that TechNow Does Not Do.  While training our most recent offering of PA-215: Palo Alto Networks Firewall Essentials FastTrack a student told his story of how he endend up in our course.  His story we have heard for other technologies like Cisco, VMware, BlueCoat and other products.

A large percentage of training is moving to the virtualized/remote lab environments.  Students are asked to use some variant of remote access software and remote into the training company's lab environment. Our student in our Palo Alto Networks Firewall course informed us that he went to a very costly offering of that course from the vendor and was not able to perform any labs.  There were either network connectivity issues, or issues with the remote access software, or other problems.  The whole training experience was very frustrating and not productive.

We keep our labs open to students if they would like after hours, or before hours access.  Repeatedly going through a lab engrains that knowledge for later recall.  Touching hardware is so critical in understanding the problems that arise when a cable comes loose, or a cable gets plugged in the wrong port.  There are other scenarios such as just pulling the power cable, or turning off a power strip, or accidently overwriting a configuration.  These disaster scenarious requires hands-on physical access to hardware.  Preventing and recovering from disasters is what it's all about, and that requires hands-on, instructor led, real hardware.