Blue Team Tasks and Cookbook

As a member of the blue team, your primary goal is to protect your organization’s systems and networks from cyber threats. However, this is no easy task. The threat landscape is constantly evolving, and you may be faced with challenges such as managing and analyzing large amounts of data, coordinating with other teams, and ensuring compliance with regulations.

In this chapter, we’ll first take a closer look at the protect, detect, and respond approach and some of the challenges that blue teamers face. Next, we will explore an overview of some useful open source tools written in PowerShell that can help you in your daily practice as a blue teamer. Finally, we will look at the blue team cookbook, a collection of PowerShell snippets that can come in handy in your daily work as a blue team practitioner.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

• Understanding the protect, detect, and respond approach
• Common PowerShell...

Technical requirements

To get the most out of this chapter, ensure that you have the following:

• Windows PowerShell 5.1
• PowerShell 7.3 and above
• Visual Studio Code
• Access to the GitHub repository for this chapter:

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/PowerShell-Automation-and-Scripting-for-Cybersecurity/tree/master/Chapter09

Protect, detect, and respond

Being a blue teamer is not an easy thing to do. You need to constantly keep up with the evolving threat landscape and stay up to date. While a red teamer needs to find just one single vulnerability to be successful, a blue teamer needs to watch for everything, as one little error already means that your network could be compromised.

Blue teamers not only need to configure and manage their systems but also analyze large amounts of data and coordinate with other teams. They need to ensure compliance with regulations and standards. And while they do all that, they need to keep the right balance between security and usability, ensuring that their users don’t get overwhelmed with all the security measures and try to bypass them by themselves.

To help keep track of everything that needs to be taken into account, categorizing tasks into protect, detect, and respond types can help. This is an approach to secure your organization’s systems, as...

Common PowerShell blue team tools

As a blue teamer, you are constantly on the lookout for tools and techniques that can help you protect your organization’s systems and networks from cyber threats.

In this section, we’ll explore some common PowerShell open source tools that can be particularly helpful for blue teamers. These tools can assist with tasks such as analyzing system logs, gathering system information, and detecting malicious activity. Some of the tools can also help with tasks such as analyzing the attack surface of a system, identifying and decoding potentially malicious data, and searching for indicators of compromise. By leveraging these tools, you can streamline your workflows and more effectively defend your organization against cyber threats.

PSGumshoe

PSGumshoe is a powerful PowerShell module that is designed to assist with tasks such as live response, hunt, and forensics. Developed by Carlos Perez, this open source tool is designed to help...

Blue team cookbook

In the following subsections, you will find some code snippets that come in handy for your daily life as a blue team PowerShell practitioner. Blue teaming is quite extensive; therefore, you won’t find use cases for every scenario but, rather, some of the basics.

Also, refer to Chapter 8, Red Team Tasks and Cookbook, as you will find many red teamer code snippets and scripts there that can also sometimes be useful for a blue teamer.

Checking for installed updates

You want to find out which updates were installed on one or more remote systems.

Solution

You can use the Get-InstalledUpdates.ps1 script to scan an IP range for installed Windows updates. You can find the script in the GitHub repository of this chapter: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/PowerShell-Automation-and-Scripting-for-Cybersecurity/blob/master/Chapter09/Get-InstalledUpdates.ps1.

Use this example to scan the 172.29.0.10-20 IP range for installed updates:

> .\Get-InstalledUpdates...

Summary

This chapter first explored the protect, detect, and respond approach, emphasizing the importance of each pillar and its role in ensuring the security of an organization.

We then provided a comprehensive overview of commonly used PowerShell tools, which are essential for blue teamers to defend an organization against security threats.

Finally, the blue team cookbook, a collection of scripts and code snippets for security analysis and defense, was explored. The cookbook covers a wide range of tasks, including checking updates, monitoring bypasses, and analyzing event logs, processes, services, and network connections. The blue team cookbook serves as a valuable resource for information security practitioners, providing practical solutions to various security challenges.

Now that we’ve discussed daily blue team operations, let’s explore further mitigation options that can help you secure your environment when using PowerShell. In the next chapter, we’...

Further reading

If you want to explore some of the topics that were mentioned in this chapter, follow these resources:

• Blue Team Notes: https://github.com/Purp1eW0lf/Blue-Team-Notes
• Blue Team Tips: https://sneakymonkey.net/blue-team-tips/
• A collection of PowerShell functions and scripts a blue teamer might use: https://github.com/tobor88/PowerShell-Blue-Team
• Creating and Starting a Windows Service Remotely Using NtObjectManager Via Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) Over SMB: https://blog.openthreatresearch.com/ntobjectmanager_rpc_smb_scm
• Detecting and Preventing PowerShell Downgrade Attacks: https://www.leeholmes.com/detecting-and-preventing-powershell-downgrade-attacks/
• Directory Services Internals Blog: https://www.dsinternals.com/en/
• Investigating PowerShell Attacks: https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/global/en/solutions/pdfs/wp-lazanciyan-investigating-powershell-attacks.pdf
• PowerForensics - PowerShell Digital Forensics: https://powerforensics...

The rest of the chapter is locked