Welcome to 2019 fellow geeks! I hope each of you had a wonderful holiday with friends and family.

It’s been a few months since my last post. As some of you may be aware I made a career move last September and took on a new role with a different organization. The first few months have been like drinking from multiple fire hoses at once and I’ve learned a ton. It’s been an amazing experience that I’m excited to continue in 2019.

One area I’ve been putting some focus in is learning the basics of Python. I’ve been a PowerShell guy (with a bit of C# thrown in there) for the past six years so diving into a new language was a welcome change. I picked up a few books on the language, watched a few videos, and it wasn’t clicking. At that point I decided it was time to jump into the deep end and come up with a use case to build out a script for. Thankfully I had one queued up that I had started in PowerShell.

Early last year my wife’s Office 365 account was hacked. Thankfully no real damage was done minus some spam email that was sent out. I went through the wonderful process of changing her passwords across her accounts, improving the complexity and length, getting her on-boarded with a password management service, and enabling Azure MFA (Multi-factor Authentication) on her Office 365 account and any additional services she was using that supported MFA options.  It was not fun.

Curious of what the logs would have shown, I had begun putting together a PowerShell script that was going to pull down the logs from Azure AD (Active Directory), extract the relevant data, and export it CSV (comma-separate values) where I could play around with it in whatever analytics tool I could get my hands on. Unfortunately life happened and I never had a chance to finish the script or play with the data. This would be my use case for my first Python script.

Azure AD offers a few different types of logs which Microsoft divides into a security pillar and an activity pillar. For my use case I was interested in looking at the reports in the Activity pillar, specifically the Sign-ins report. This report is available for tenants with an Azure AD Premium P1 or P2 subscription (I added P2 subscriptions to our family accounts last year).  The sign-in logs have a retention period of 30 days and are available either through the Azure Portal or programmatically through the MS Graph API (Application Programming Interface).

My primary goals were to create as much reusable code as possible and experiment with as many APIs/SDKs (Software Development Kits) as I could.  This was accomplished by breaking the code into various reusable modules and leveraging AWS (Amazon Web Services) services for secure storage of Azure AD application credentials and cloud-based storage of the exported data.  Going this route forced me to use the MS Graph API, Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory Library for Python (or ADAL for short), and Amazon’s Boto3 Python SDK.

On the AWS side I used AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store to store the Azure AD credentials as secure strings encrypted with a AWS KMS (Key Management Service) customer-managed customer master key (CMK).  For cloud storage of the log files I used Amazon S3.

Lastly I needed a development environment and source control.  For about a day I simply used Sublime Text on my Mac and saved the file to a personal cloud storage account.  This was obviously not a great idea so I decided to finally get my GitHub repository up and running.  Additionally I moved over to using AWS’s Cloud9 for my IDE (integrated development environment).   Cloud9 has the wonderful perk of being web based and has the capability of creating temporary credentials that can do most of what my AWS IAM user can do.  This made it simple to handle permissions to the various resources I was using.

Once the instance of Cloud9 was spun up I needed to set the environment up for Python 3 and add the necessary libraries.  The AMI (Amazon Machine Image) used by the Cloud9 service to provision new instances includes both Python 2.7 and Python 3.6.  This fact matters when adding the ADAL and Boto3 modules via pip because if you simply run a pip install module_name it will be installed for Python 2.7.  Instead you’ll want to execute the command python3 -m pip install module_name which ensures that the two modules are installed in the appropriate location.

In my next post I’ll walk through and demonstrate the script.

Have a great week!