T1055.012: Process Hollowing
Adversaries may inject malicious code into suspended and hollowed processes in order to evade process-based defenses. Process hollowing is a method of executing arbitrary code in the address space of a separate live process.
Process hollowing is commonly performed by creating a process in a suspended state then unmapping/hollowing its memory, which can then be replaced with malicious code. A victim process can be created with native Windows API calls such as CreateProcess
, which includes a flag to suspend the processes primary thread. At this point the process can be unmapped using APIs calls such as ZwUnmapViewOfSection
or NtUnmapViewOfSection
before being written to, realigned to the injected code, and resumed via VirtualAllocEx
, WriteProcessMemory
, SetThreadContext
, then ResumeThread
respectively.
This is very similar to Thread Local Storage but creates a new process rather than targeting an existing process. This behavior will likely not result in elevated privileges since the injected process was spawned from (and thus inherits the security context) of the injecting process. However, execution via process hollowing may also evade detection from security products since the execution is masked under a legitimate process.
Positive Technologies products that cover the technique
MaxPatrol SIEM knowledge base
mitre_attck_defense_evasion: PT-CR-2222: Proccess_Tampering: A process created a thread in the address space of a process. Attackers inject code into processes to bypass process-based security or escalate privileges. mitre_attck_defense_evasion: PT-CR-781: TikiTorch_Process_Injection: Process injection using TikiTorch is detected
Detection
ID | DS0009 | Data source and component | Process: Process Creation | Description | Monitor for newly executed processes that may inject malicious code into suspended and hollowed processes in order to evade process-based defenses. Adversaries may start legitimate processes and then use their memory space to run malicious code. This analytic looks for common Windows processes that have been abused this way in the past; when the processes are started for this purpose they may not have the standard parent that we would expect. This list is not exhaustive, and it is possible for cyber actors to avoid this discepency. These signatures only work if Sysmon reports the parent process, which may not always be the case if the parent dies before sysmon processes the event. Analytic 1 - Processes Started From Irregular Parents
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ID | DS0009 | Data source and component | Process: Process Modification | Description | Monitor for changes made to processes that may inject malicious code into suspended and hollowed processes in order to evade process-based defenses. |
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ID | DS0009 | Data source and component | Process: OS API Execution | Description | Monitoring Windows API calls indicative of the various types of code injection may generate a significant amount of data and may not be directly useful for defense unless collected under specific circumstances for known bad sequences of calls, since benign use of API functions may be common and difficult to distinguish from malicious behavior. Windows API calls such as |
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ID | DS0009 | Data source and component | Process: Process Access | Description | Monitor for processes being viewed that may inject malicious code into suspended and hollowed processes in order to evade process-based defenses. |
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Mitigation
ID | M1040 | Name | Behavior Prevention on Endpoint | Description | Some endpoint security solutions can be configured to block some types of process injection based on common sequences of behavior that occur during the injection process. |
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