Quick Tip Invoke-History
The more time I spend living in the CLI the more I appreciate learning and adopting shorthand for operations. In Powershell the aliases for Where-Object and...
Status Update
Hi all. Just wanted to provide a brief status update. It’s been a while since my last post and while I have been busy, and making frequent use of Powershell, I haven’t had anything novel that I felt like sharing.
I’ve still been using the Get-GeoLocation function quite a bit as well as another function I wrote called Get-WhoIsIP. It’s nothing crazy and primarily leverages “http://ipwho.is” API for results. I spend a lot of time using Powershell as a CLI and want a way to quickly look up IP addresses to determine ownership. Sometimes lots of IP addresses.
Primarily I would say that I’ve had a lot of occasion to help other people with their Powershell related needs. Here are some highlight topics I can think of:
- modified a Domain Join script to handle adding a computer to groups as part of the process.
- A script as part of a Scheduled Task that emails a CSV of specific types of accounts that need to change their password (based on age)
- A script for someone that needs to rename hundreds of files based on string text found within. Was previously a manual process, now thanks to Powershell (and Regex) something that used to take hours and hours each week takes a couple of seconds.
- A couple different Active Directory off-boarding scripts to consistently handle removing accounts.
- A script that resets an Active Directory user’s password expiry clock. Effectively changing the “Password Last Set” time to that of script execution.
- A series of scripts with Scheduled Task setups/executions, data output, and data collection. Heavily relying on DPAPI and AES encryption for data protection. The “psuedo code” is basically; execute script, save data, acquire data, alert on data. This also involves build scripts, deployment scripts, removal scripts and a few Scheduled Tasks. Was a lot of fun to write.
- Helped on a CTF that involved a lot of deobfuscating Powershell and finding flags within the code.
That’s about it. I’m still looking for the idea that’s going to inspire me to write another Powershell module. For now I’ll keep maintaining my team’s internal module, and my publicly available ProtectStrings module.
2024
Powershell Summit 2024
I got the opportunity this week to attend the 2024 Powershell Summit in Bellevue Washington. If you have an opportunity to go to this, whether you’re brand ...
2023
SecretStore Module
SecretManagement module is a Powershell module intended to make it easier to store and retrieve secrets. The secrets are stored in SecretManagement extens...
Reset Expiration Clock
With more and more people working remotely there’s been a huge uptick in VPN usage. A lot of organizations have had to completely rethink some of their prev...
Status Update
Hi all. Just wanted to provide a brief status update. It’s been a while since my last post and while I have been busy, and making frequent use of Powershel...
2022
Get-GeoLocation
Getting GPS Coordinates From A Windows Machine Since 2020 a lot of organizations have ended up with a more distributed workforce than they previously had. T...
Quick Tip on ParameterSetNames
I was writing a new function today. Oddly enough I was actually re-writing a function today and hadn’t realized it. Let me explain. Story Time About a hal...
ProtectStrings. A Module Story
I’ve had an itch lately to do something with AES encryption in Powershell. I’ve tossed around the idea of building a password manager in Powershell, but I g...
Powershell all of the things. And more logging
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” - Abraham Maslow. I use a variation of this quote a lot, and I typically use it in jest, but it’s...
2021
Get-WindowsFirewallBlocks
Introduction I’ve had some exposure to Microsoft Defender here and there, but I was in a class with Microsoft recently where they were going over some more f...
Logging in Powershell scripts; Continued
In my previous post I explained a bit about some of my justifications for logging in Powershell. My interest in logging has continued since then and I spent...
Logging in Powershell scripts
Everyone has a different use for Powershell. Some people use it for daily administrative tasks at work. Some people are hard at work developing Powershell m...
Parsing log files with Powershell
Early on when I first started using Powershell I was dealing with some firewall logs from a perimeter firewall. They were exported from a SIEM in CSV format...
Get-Connections; netstat for Powershell
One of the tools I feel like I’ve been using for years is Netstat. It exists in both Linux and Windows (with some differences) and has similar syntax. It’s ...
Secure Credentials in Powershell
A coworker from a neighboring department had an interesting request one day. They wanted a scheduled task to run on a server. Through whatever mechanism the ...
Get-ADPasswordInfo
When I first started getting in to Powershell I was working in an IT Security position and was sifting through a lot of “noise” in the SIEM alerts. The main...
Jekyll & Minimal Mistakes; Done
“Hello World” and all that. What started as a small conversation turned in to an Idea that I couldn’t shake: I wanted a blog. But I didn’t want a WordPress...