Practical Malware Analysis

Monitoring with Process Monitor

Process Monitor, or procmon, is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that provides a way to monitor certain registry, file system, network, process, and thread activity. It combines and enhances the functionality of two legacy tools: FileMon and RegMon.

Although procmon captures a lot of data, it doesn’t capture everything. For example, it can miss the device driver activity of a user-mode component talking to a rootkit via device I/O controls, as well as certain GUI calls, such as SetWindowsHookEx. Although procmon can be a useful tool, it usually should not be used for logging network activity, because it does not work consistently across Microsoft Windows versions.

Warning

Throughout this chapter, we will use ...