Luckily ScriptBlock logging had been turned on ahead of time. The issue was traced to a naming issue in some code that was run. When you need to audit specific PowerShell modules being used on a host, Module Logging is the answer. Module logging will generate a lot more events than ScriptBlock logging does. You will want to consider the implications and develop a strategy for its use.
Not every environment has a Group Policy available. So what do you do in these environments if you need to audit and log PowerShell module usage? You use the Windows Registry!
When module logging is enabled, modules are not automatically monitored. You have to specify which modules to log. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can do this for specific modules or for all modules. It is not recommended to only monitor specific modules. To log module usage in a single session with PowerShell, you have first to import the module you wish to audit.
After running the above command, each time you invoke the VMware. However, this method is only valid for the current session. Once you close PowerShell, the logging stops until you start it again. If you are logging all PowerShell modules, you are going to see a lot of entries. You can filter them down to your liking.
However, that is out of the scope of this article. If you prefer to log all the modules, for all the users, all the time, then you need to edit the Windows Registry once more to add a new key value to the Module Logging key that you created earlier in this section. Press Enter once more, and now all PowerShell modules will be logged each time used. If you have an environment where you can use Group Policy, it may be easier to use the following policy objects to implement logging and auditing.
Then edit the policy as follows:. Alternatively, you could list out specific modules by their name too. PowerShell logging and auditing capabilities make using PowerShell a very poor choice for bad actors trying to do bad things. The methods discussed in this article enable you to master the art of PowerShell Logging and Auditing, making you a better SecOps or SysOps professional.
You are encouraged to look through the additional resource links below to further your PowerShell logging and auditing knowledge. Now go forth, and fortify your PowerShell environments by logging and recording all the PowerShell things! Enabling Script Block Logging. Creating Group Policy Objects. Group Policy to Registry Reference. Get this interactive comic book to learn how Veeam and AWS can help you fight ransomware, data sprawl, rising cloud costs, unforeseen data loss and make you a hero!
ATA is known for its high-quality written tutorials in the form of blog posts. Whenever I can, I use PowerShell for my measurement scripts. PowerShell Core is the cross-platform version of the language. It's currently in version 7. It's based on the. NET Core framework which is different, and slightly less mature than the Windows. NET framework. In this series, I'll explore some of the PowerShell tools which have made me much more efficient in my audit and compliance work.
The first of those tools is Pester. Pester describes itself as "the ubiquitous test and mock framework for PowerShell. Consider a simple example: The enterprise has decided to require certain local account settings on all Windows servers and workstations:. I can write a set of Pester tests to validate these settings on a system. The tests are implemented inside of "It" blocks. The script to perform tests for these three policy requirements might look like this.
Pester can provide a custom PowerShell object with contains information about the tests run. This is as simple as using the "Passthru" parameter on the command line when I run the tests. I can capture that output and import it into a dashboard or calculate the percentage of tests which failed. I can save the passed-through object from a Pester run into a variable to make it easier to process the results.
If I wanted to see the percentage of tests which failed, I might do something like this:. In my consulting practice, we run tests like this daily against all the systems in an environment and ingest the results into a time-series database like Graphite, so we can visualize the results over time.
Notice that in the previous example I calculated the percentage of tests which failed. We always use larger numbers to represent higher risk, i. You could use compliance, rather than risk, as your yardstick and have higher numbers be better.
The important thing is to present the data consistently across your visualizations. Color-coding the results and using threshold lines in your dashboard can help to make "good" and "bad" results more obvious to the consumers. Pester can be run inside your continuous integration CI pipelines by passing it a configuration object which instructs Pester to save the results in NUint format for further analysis. Boe is currently a senior systems administrator with BAE Systems. He looks to script whatever he can, whenever he can.
He is also a moderator on the Hey, Scripting Guy! It does, however, show examples of what I have been able to put together using Windows PowerShell to create an application to manage the patching of servers in an enterprise environment.
Something that I have been working on for a little while as a work project is a way for other users in my shop to be able to patch our servers during a downtime without actually having to log into each server remotely to install the patches that have been downloaded from the local WSUS server. Initially, I wrote two sets of Windows PowerShell scripts: one to audit for patches that were downloaded to each server and waiting to be installed, and another that would install those patches on the server remotely.
We needed something that would make it easy for anyone to use a GUI and still perform the same tasks as the original scripts I wrote. If you wish to learn more about what I did to initially build this utility, go to this blog post.
My next post tomorrow will also go into some issues I ran into during the build and what I was able to do to resolve them. From there, unzip the file to wherever you wish. No more double-clicking a system to run an operation. One of the first changes I made was the removal of double-clicking on a system in the server list to perform the specified operation. Instead of doing that, you can now right-click a system and bring up a shortcut menu to select a few different items, such as removing a server, viewing the WindowsUpdatelog.
Clicking Run in the shortcut menu will perform the specified operation that is designated below the server list Audit , Install , Test Network Connection , or Reboot. Originally, the Add Server menu only let you add one system at a time. While this is okay, I felt that it needed the ability to add more than one system at a time. Simply right-click the server list window, click Add Server , type each system name, and then click OK.
After clicking OK , the servers are then added to the server list, as shown in the following figure. Support for operations against multiple systems at a time. One of my most requested features was the ability to perform the operations audit, install, etc. Doing this allows for a much quicker process of completing whichever operation that you decide to do; otherwise, the operation could take a much longer time than you would expect.
As you can see from another new feature—the Notes column—all the systems are being audited for patches that have been downloaded from the WSUS server. As each system is finished, it will be updated accordingly on the server list with the number of patches found.
Depending on the operation you choose, the Notes column and other columns will be affected as well based on the decision.
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