Detecting Process Hollowing Technique

When to Use

• When investigating suspected fileless malware or in-memory threats
• After EDR alerts on process injection or suspicious memory operations
• When hunting for defense evasion techniques in a compromised environment
• When threat intel reports indicate process hollowing in active campaigns
• During purple team exercises validating T1055.012 detection coverage

Prerequisites

• EDR with memory protection monitoring (CrowdStrike, MDE, SentinelOne)
• Sysmon with Event IDs 1 (Process Create), 8 (CreateRemoteThread), 25 (ProcessTampering)
• Windows ETW providers for process hollowing (Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Process)
• Memory forensics capabilities (Volatility, WinDbg)
• Process integrity monitoring tools

Workflow

1. Understand Hollowing Mechanics: Process hollowing involves creating a legitimate process in suspended state, unmapping its memory, writing malicious code, then resuming execution.
2. Monitor Suspended Process Creation: Hunt for processes created with CREATE_SUSPENDED flag followed by memory writes and thread resumption.
3. Detect Memory Section Anomalies: Identify processes where the in-memory ima…