Welcome to our next episode! Last time we were talking about Powershell, demonstrating some different ways that we could use it to begin to automate some of our audit and administrative tasks. For example, pulling some information out of our Active Directory.

In this week's AuditCast we're going to continue on and try to modularize some of the code that we wrote last week. At the same time, we'll try to simplify, clean it up, and finally generalize it just a bit, to create something that we can use in many different tasks that we'll be examining over the next couple of weeks. Before starting the AuditCast, I actually did do one or two things that I've done ahead of time.

The first thing is that I took some of the code that we were working with last week, the code that actually got the handle for doing a domain search, and I moved that into what's called a "function." This week we'll see how we can leverage these sorts of things. You should be able to see that see that this code is essentially exactly the same code we wrote last week; the only difference is it's in a function.

For a full write-up along with the source code for the scripts written in this episode, please go here:

http://it-audit.sans.org/blog/2012/03/15/learning-powershell-how-to-extract-user-objects-from-active-directory-using-powershell/