User profiles

User profiles are a common challenge in enterprises. Since they are autogenerated upon logon and there is no built-in automated functionality to remove local profiles, systems are plagued with old profile accounts. Old profiles not only consume data on systems, they also reveal information about other active accounts in the environment.

PowerShell offers the ability to retrieve user profile information. To retrieve user profiles from a system, you can leverage the get-wmiobject cmdlet calling the win32_UserProfile class. After you retrieve user profile objects, you have the ability to use multiple properties to gather information about the profiles. The .SID property is the security identifier of the user in the profile. While the SID is a unique user number, you can easily translate it with the .NET System.Security.Principal class. You first start by creating a new .NET object by calling the New-Object cmdlet with the System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier class with...