Offensive PowerShell: From Syntax to Scanner

Description

[+] By the end of this course, students will be able to:

1) PowerShell fundamentals

Navigate the PowerShell environment and understand how it differs from CMD and Bash
Declare and use variables, including PowerShell's automatic and special variables
Apply arithmetic, comparison, logical, assignment, and other operators correctly in scripts
Control script flow using if statements and loops

2) Data structures & manipulation
Create, index, and iterate over arrays, and leverage built-in array properties and methods
Build and query hashtables for key-value data storage
Write and apply regular expressions using PowerShell's -match, -replace, and regex operators to parse and extract patterns from text

3) File & system management

Create, rename, move, copy, and remove files and directories through PowerShell
Generate, read, and manipulate XML and CSV files for structured data workflows
Test file existence, clear content, and append data programmatically
Use and create aliases to streamline command-line work

4) Offensive scripting & reconnaissance (the payoff)

Build a custom WordPress scanner that fingerprints target sites
Extract all hyperlinks from a web page for crawling and recon
Pull JavaScript code from a page's source for inspection and analysis
Harvest HTML comments — a classic source of leaked developer information
Combine PowerShell's web cmdlets, regex, and loops to write your own reusable recon tools

5 ) Mindset & transferable skills

Think like an attacker when approaching a scripting problem: identify the target, the data to extract, and the cleanest path to it
Read and adapt other people's PowerShell scripts to your own use cases
Lay the groundwork for moving into more advanced red-team tooling (PowerSploit, Empire, Nishang) with confidence in the underlying language

What You'll Learn

By the end of this course, students will be able to:
PowerShell fundamentals

Navigate the PowerShell environment and understand how it differs from CMD and Bash
Declare and use variables, including PowerShell's automatic and special variables
Apply arithmetic, comparison, logical, assignment, and other operators correctly in scripts
Control script flow using if statements and loops

Data structures & manipulation

Create, index, and iterate over arrays, and leverage built-in array properties and methods
Build and query hashtables for key-value data storage
Write and apply regular expressions using PowerShell's -match, -replace, and regex operators to parse and extract patterns from text

File & system management

Create, rename, move, copy, and remove files and directories through PowerShell
Generate, read, and manipulate XML and CSV files for structured data workflows
Test file existence, clear content, and append data programmatically
Use and create aliases to streamline command-line work

Offensive scripting & reconnaissance (the payoff)

Build a custom WordPress scanner that fingerprints target sites
Extract all hyperlinks from a web page for crawling and recon
Pull JavaScript code from a page's source for inspection and analysis
Harvest HTML comments — a classic source of leaked developer information
Combine PowerShell's web cmdlets, regex, and loops to write your own reusable recon tools

Mindset & transferable skills

Think like an attacker when approaching a scripting problem: identify the target, the data to extract, and the cleanest path to it
Read and adapt other people's PowerShell scripts to your own use cases
Lay the groundwork for moving into more advanced red-team tooling (PowerSploit, Empire, Nishang) with confidence in the underlying language