Decoding hidden PowerShell

Undo the encoding

Pull the blob after -enc, base64-decode it, and strip the UTF-16 null bytes to read the real command:

grep -oE 'enc [A-Za-z0-9+/=]+' /srv/soc-data/windows/security.log | awk '{print $2}' | base64 -d | tr -d '\0'

In the terminal

student@vulntech:~$ grep -oE 'enc [A-Za-z0-9+/=]+' /srv/soc-data/windows/security.log | awk '{print $2}' | base64 -d | tr -d '\0'
IEX(New-Object Net

What comes back — an IEX(New-Object Net...) downloader — is the attacker's real intent, in the clear. You would record it as an indicator and move on to containment.

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