SHELLCON 2017 Practical Implants for Windows in PowerShell Chris Bad2Beef

Chances are there are a few things we all know about PowerShell. It’s great, it’s nearly ubiquitous on Windows, and we can get up to some crazy red team shenaniganry with it. One shouldn’t necessarily be judged if their knowledge of PowerShell ends there. After all, the information security space is far too vast for everyone to know everything.

That said, we’re in a dangerous spot. So much thought space seems to be dedicated to matching pre-fabricated tools with pre-defined scenarios akin to the script kiddie methodology of yesteryear. We don’t need to be an expert on everything, but something that has become as core as PowerShell should at least warrant a little bit of study.

To that end, we’ll walk through creation, execution, and persistence of a few basic implant prototypes written in PowerShell for Windows. Along the way we’ll look at a few different notes and techniques for coding, packaging, and execution within the contexts of detectability and mitigation.

The talk will focus on practical instruction and key gimmies and gotchas. By the end of the discussion, the audience is expected to have a better understanding about how PowerShell tools are written an executed, leading to a greater command over existing tools and techniques. With a bit of additional study, the audience should be able to author tools of their own.