I have been involved with shell programming now for the last 5 or 6 years. I am directing my career towards IT Security and need to broaden my experience.
I would like suggestions for a good programming language for Windows. Is there a Windows scripting language that is considered secure ?
Has anyone tried out Powershell for Windows ? What should I not waste my time on ? I would like to be able to do such things like extracting event logs from various servers, workstations, etc., verifying security settings, etc.
All suggestions are gratefully accepted :o
VBscript has a reputation for being insecure, but I don't think it is fairly deserved, it is simply a powerful language. The problem was a variety of applications that allowed the outside world to run VBscript routines. Disabling VBscript was a bandaid for other problems. If you let anyone on Earth run any Perl or Ksh scripts they want, then those languages would be just as "insecure". That said, Microsoft is moving away from VBscript so I would not now recommend learning it.
.bat files have been around forever and will probably never go away. It is an odd language, but it is more powerful than most folks realize. If you don't know .bat files, you might start there. Powershell is Microsoft's latest experiment. It might last or they may drop it as fast as VBscript. Powershell has been made available for XP so I have been thinking of downloading it and giving it a try. But so far, I have no experience with it.
I would suggest "Visual Basic for Applications", but even this will be replaced by "Visual Studio Tools for Applications".
Previously I've written a simple eventlog tool in C using the WIN32 APIs OpenEventLog/ BackupEventLog/ ClearEventLog, these will work remotely.
i tend to use .bat since it is normally installed in whatever wintel box comes in ... i have created .bat scripts that worked just fine extracting lines from logs and checking system settings using only native windows commands ... i have also used .bat scripts with ported unix binaries (i.e., awk.exe, sed.exe, etc.) which made the scripts work much better ... you should be able to google for those ported binaries without any issues ...
good luck!