Category: Breaking

Process Hollowing is a technique used by various malware families (such as FormBook, TrickBot and Agent Tesla) to hide their malicious code within a benign appearing process. The typical workflow for setting up such a hollowed process is as follows:

1. Create a new process (victim) using a benign executable, in suspended state.
2. Unmap the executable from that process.
3. Allocate memory for the malicious executable at the address of the previously mapped victim executable.
4. Write the malicious executable to the new memory area and potentially apply relocations.
5. Adjust the entry point.
6. Resume process.

We will refer to this as the “normal” Process Hollowing workflow. There are also variants of this technique, one being to not unmap the original executable and to allocate the new memory somewhere else. We will call this one no-unmap. But wait, why does malware not simply overwrite the existing executable but creates a new memory area which stands out due to its characteristics? In this blog post we will have a closer look at this overwrite approach but also on the no-unmap method, their effects on analysis/detection tools and on some tricks to make the detection harder. We are also releasing Proof of Concept implementations of all mentioned tools/plugins (the links are at the end of this post).

Continue reading “Some experiments with Process Hollowing”