Masquerading: Match Legitimate Name or Location Defense Evasion [Mitre]

Adversaries may match or approximate the name or location of legitimate files or resources when naming/placing them. This is done for the sake of evading defenses and observation. This may be done by placing an executable in a commonly trusted directory (ex: under System32) or giving it the name of a legitimate, trusted program (ex: svchost.exe). In containerized environments, this …

Process Hollowing, RunPE Process Manipulating

Process hollowing is a technique used by malware to evade detection by injecting malicious code into a legitimate process. This technique involves creating a new instance of a legitimate process and replacing its original code with the malicious payload.

The process is the following:

CreateProcess: in a suspended mode with the CreationFlag at 0x0000 0004.
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Process Camouflage, Masquerading Process Manipulating

Masquerading is a technique used by malware to evade detection by disguising itself as a legitimate file. This is typically achieved by renaming the malicious file to match the name of a commonly found and trusted file, such as svchost.exe, and placing it in a legitimate folder.

Masquerading can occur when the name or location of an executable, …

DLL Injection via CreateRemoteThread and LoadLibrary Process Manipulating

DLL Injection Via CreateRemoteThread and LoadLibrary is a technique used by malware to inject its code into a legitimate process. This technique is similar to hook injection, where the malware inserts a malicious DLL to be used by the system. It is one of the most common techniques used to inject malware into another process.

The malware writes the …

FIleless Mechanisms Process Manipulating

Fileless malware is a type of malware that is designed to reside and execute entirely in the memory of a host system, without leaving any trace on the local disk. This can make it more difficult for security tools to detect and remove the malware, as it does not leave any files on the system that can be scanned or …

Process Doppelgänging Process Manipulating

This technique leverages the Transactional NTFS functionality in Windows. This functionality helps maintain data integrity during an unexpected error. For example, when an application needs to write or modify a file, if an error is triggered mid-write, the data can be corrupted. To avoid this kind of behavior, an application can open the file in a transactional mode to perform …

FLIRT Signatures Evasion Anti-Disassembly

FLIRT Signature evasion is a technique used by malware to hide malicious code inside legitimate functions from known libraries. FLIRT (Fast Library Identification and Recognition Technology) is a database that contains signature patterns for identifying known functions from legitimate libraries.

Malware authors can abuse these signatures by modifying or adding specific bytes to the code, so that it appears …

Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Search Order Hijacking Defense Evasion [Mitre]

Adversaries may execute their own malicious payloads by hijacking the search order used to load DLLs. Windows systems use a common method to look for required DLLs to load into a program. Hijacking DLL loads may be for the purpose of establishing persistence as well as elevating privileges and/or evading restrictions on file execution.

There are many ways an …

Homograph Attack (Punycode) Network Evasion

A homograph attack is a type of phishing attack that uses homoglyphs (characters that look similar to other characters) to create domain names or URLs that appear to be legitimate, but are actually controlled by an attacker. Homograph attacks take advantage of the fact that many languages have characters that are visually similar to characters used in other languages.

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Hijack Execution Flow: DLL Side-Loading Defense Evasion [Mitre]

Adversaries may execute their own malicious payloads by side-loading DLLs. Similar to DLL Search Order Hijacking, side-loading involves hijacking which DLL a program loads. But rather than just planting the DLL within the search order of a program then waiting for the victim application to be invoked, adversaries may directly side-load their payloads by planting then invoking a legitimate application …

Search Evasion Techniques

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