Managing credentials in PowerShell and scheduled tasks

Hello there,

I hope you are doing good, here is a little post on security concerns you might have while scripting tools for managing… stuff with PowerShell 😎.

The options there are pretty simple, either you store your credentials in a file which is super bad ! or you can prompt the operator using your script to provide some. This is not viable for automated script launched from an Azure Functions or through a planned task.

In this article, I would like to take the old school path where you run scripts from a VM through a scheduled task. For credentials management in Azure Functions, here is a link for the best practices.

A very nice tool for managing credentials in a secure and automated manner is the Credentials Manager :

Credential Manager — The place where credentials are automatically saved, you can add the ones you need

From PowerShell, you can install the CredentialManagement module and use the provided cmdLets to Create, Retrieve or remove Credentials. Here is the way to use it :

#Install the module :
Install-Module -Name CredentialManager
#Create Credentials
Add-StoredCredentials -UserName  -Password  -Type GENERIC
#Remove Credentials
Remove-SotredCredential -Target ''
#Retrieve Credentials
$cred = Get-SotredCredential -Target ''

CredentialManagement module cmdLets — Here are the provided cmdLets

With this tool, you can then run planned scripts and stored the required credentials in a variable. Just in case, here is the way to run Scripts from the tasks scheduler:

Creating a scheduled task — First select a folder and right click to create a new task

Choose a name and the trigger, then in the Actions tab click new and select start a program

You need to tell to run Powershell :
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe in my case
To provide arguments containing the file you want to run :
-File “” And, if you need, a start location.

I hope you took some of it, at least a page to refer while configuring scheduled scripts 😅. See you soon in the blog section !