T1055.012: Process Hollowing
| View on MITRE ATT&CK | T1055.012 |
|---|---|
| Tactic(s) | Defense Evasion, Privilege Escalation |
Data from MITRE ATT&CK®:
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.(Citation: Leitch Hollowing)(Citation: Elastic Process Injection July 2017)
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.
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MITRE ATT&CK Data Components
Process Creation (Process)
The initial construction of an executable managed by the OS, that may involve one or more tasks or threads. (e.g. Win EID 4688, Sysmon EID 1, cmd.exe > net use, etc.)Process Access (Process)
Opening of a process by another process, typically to read memory of the target process (ex: Sysmon EID 10)Process Modification (Process)
Changes made to a process, or its contents, typically to write and/or execute code in the memory of the target process (ex: Sysmon EID 8)OS API Execution (Process)
Operating system function/method calls executed by a processControl Validation Tests for this Technique
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SP800-53 Controls
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