Practical Malware Analysis

Process Injection

The most popular covert launching technique is process injection. As the name implies, this technique injects code into another running process, and that process unwittingly executes the malicious code. Malware authors use process injection in an attempt to conceal the malicious behavior of their code, and sometimes they use this to try to bypass host-based firewalls and other process-specific security mechanisms.

Certain Windows API calls are commonly used for process injection. For example, the VirtualAllocEx function can be used to allocate space in an external process’s memory, and WriteProcessMemory can be used to write data to that allocated space. This pair of functions is essential to the first three loading techniques ...