ATT&CK coverage › Technique

Masquerading: Break Process Trees T1036.009

An adversary may attempt to evade process tree-based analysis by modifying executed malware's parent process ID (PPID). If endpoint protection software leverages the “parent-child" relationship for detection, breaking this relationship could result in the adversary’s behavior not being associated with previous process tree activity. On Unix-based systems breaking this process tree is common practice for administrators to execute software using scripts and programs.

Events covered

2 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 2 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. Field names are normalized across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.

Fields filtered most (5 distinct)

The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.

FieldRulesHowSample values
CommandLine2ne 1, eq 1unknown, "*windows\\system32\\*"
process_name1eq 1"svchost.exe"
ParentImage1ne 1"C:\\Program Files\\Windows Defender\\MsMpEng.exe", "C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Windows...
parent_process_name1ne 1"services.exe"
Image1eq 1"*\\Windows\\SysWOW64\\*"

Top indicator values (7 distinct)

Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique.

FieldKindValueRules (here)Corpus reach
ParentImagene"C:\\Program Files\\Windows Defender\\MsMpEng.exe"1
process_nameeq"svchost.exe"1
CommandLineneunknown12
ParentImagene"C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\Platform\\*\\MsMpEng.exe"1
parent_process_namene"services.exe"1
CommandLineeq"*windows\\system32\\*"1
Imageeq"*\\Windows\\SysWOW64\\*"1

Rules under this technique

Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.

Splunk 2 rules