Now that we’ve learned to work with PowerShell variables and objects, let’s start to build something that might be useful in a competition like CyberPatriot.

In this Lab We Will:

Learn the basics of user and group management within PowerShell.

Note: You’ll want to use this sheet as a reference point. Once we start writing an automation script, these commands and explanations will be very helpful!

Let’s start by creating a single local user on the system using the CLI.

To do this, let’s see what our old friend get-help has to say.

Get-Help New-LocalUser -online

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It looks like `New-LocalUser` accepts several different parameters, but for this lab, we’ll just be using:

Name
FullName
Password

Creating Windows Passwords using PowerShell

Whenever you create or utilize a password within PowerShell, you must use the `ConvertTo-SecureString` cmdlet. (This is very common, and you’ll always see it used frequently when working with PowerShell.)

The get-help command above contains the following information:

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The first step is to create a variable of type ‘SecureString’ that we want the user to have upon account creation. Here’s how we do that:

$password = ConvertTo-SecureString "Student123!" -AsPlainText -Force

Again, you will see this syntax frequently in the real world, as most of the time, passwords will be handled as ‘SecureStrings’ in PowerShell.

Now that we have a `$password` variable prepped, we can run `New-LocalUser` to create a new user on the system with a ‘Name’, ‘Password’, and ‘FullName’.