Re: PowerShell Assessment

["J. McCluggage" <j2mccluggage () adelphia net>]

I might be missing something in your question but you should not need either
ADWS & ADMGS if you are using a machine in the active directory domain and
running under an account with proper permissions to fully query the Active
Directory. 

 

For Active Directory and PowerShell you primarily have three options (there
are probably others that I am not aware of):

 

ADSI

Quest Active Directory commandlets/module

Microsoft Active Directory module for PowerShell 2.0 (last I knew this would
only work against a Windows 2008 R2 domain and could only be ran from an R2
or Win 7 machine)

 

My personal preference is the Quest Module.  The downside is that you have
to install an additional module which may or may not be an issue depending
on the environment.  The benefit to ADSI is that it is built-in.  You may
want to check out Jeffery Hicks excellent book "Managing Active Directory
with Windows PowerShell: TFM, 2nd Edition".

 

Also if you are using PowerShell as an assessment tool, don't overlook WMI.
A wealth of information can be retrieved using WMI.

 

 

 

From: pauldotcom-bounces () mail pauldotcom com
[mailto:pauldotcom-bounces () mail pauldotcom com] On Behalf Of Cody Dumont
Sent: Monday, August 01, 2011 8:19 AM
To: pauldotcom () mail pauldotcom com
Subject: [Pauldotcom] PowerShell Assessment

 

 

Greetings All in the PDC world, I am starting my GCWN Gold certification,
and the paper is going to focus on doing assessments of a Windows
environment using the PowerShell.  

 

While I am not a PowerShell guru, I figured this would be a great way to
emerse  myself in the PowerShell. So the first big stumbling block I have
run into, is to assess an AD environment you need to install the Active
Directory Web Service (ADWS) and/or Active Directory Management Gateway
Service (ADMGS).

 

When doing assessments I don't like to ask customers to install software
agents, if you will, to support the assessment.  My questions to the mailing
list are two fold:

 

1.  Is installing the ADWS & ADMGS truly necessary, and if so are these
services commonly installed?  So, asking the customer to install the service
would not be unreasonable, or I should find the service installed all ready.

 

2.  Not counting the Quest Snapins, because I already have them installed,
are their any other PowerShell plugins that a security professional or
windows administrator would need to install.  Please keep in-mind the focus
of the paper is the AD and IIS, so the plugins for exchange and VM Ware,
while very much necessary for a lot of things, I am focusing on just AD and
IIS for the research paper.

 

 

 

Thanks

Cody

 

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