ATT&CK coverage › Technique

Process Injection: Portable Executable Injection T1055.002

Adversaries may inject portable executables (PE) into processes in order to evade process-based defenses as well as possibly elevate privileges. PE injection is a method of executing arbitrary code in the address space of a separate live process.

Events covered

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

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon8CreateRemoteThread
Sysmon10ProcessAccess

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 4 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 (3 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
TargetImage4in 2, eq 2"*\\werfault.exe", "*\\backgroundtaskhost.exe", "*\\searchprotocolhost.exe", *\\notepad.exe, "*\\ping.exe"
EventID4eq 410, 8
GrantedAccess2in 2"0x1fffff", "0x40", "0x1f3fff"

Top indicator values (37 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
EventIDeq10214
TargetImagein"*\\CalculatorApp.exe"22
TargetImagein"*\\win32calc.exe"22
TargetImagein"*\\notepad.exe"22
GrantedAccessin"0x40"23
TargetImagein"*\\calc.exe"22
GrantedAccessin"0x1fffff"24
EventIDeq828
TargetImagein"*\\wuauclt.exe"1
TargetImagein"*\\searchprotocolhost.exe"1
TargetImagein"*\\backgroundtaskhost.exe"1
TargetImagein"*\\werfault.exe"1
TargetImagein"*\\edge.exe"1
TargetImagein"*\\regsvr32.exe"1
GrantedAccessin"0x1f3fff"1
TargetImagein"*\\svchost.exe"12
TargetImagein"*\\dllhost.exe"1
TargetImagein"*\\firefox.exe"13
TargetImagein"*\\chrome.exe"13
TargetImagein"*\\lsass.exe"1

Common exclusions (10 distinct)

Field/operator/value combinations that rules under this technique routinely exclude (top-level not() clauses). These are the false-positive paths the community has learned to filter out. A new rule that ignores the high-count entries here will likely fire on the same noisy paths.

FieldKindValueRules excluding
Imagein"*:\\Windows\\SysWOW64\\*"1
Imagein"*:\\Windows\\System32\\*"1
Imagein"*:\\Windows\\Program Files (x86)\\*"1
Imagein"*:\\Windows\\Program Files\\*"1
Imagein"*\\system32\\*"1
Imagein"*\\Program Files\\*"1
Imagein"*\\syswow64\\*"1
Imagein"C:\\Windows\\*"1
Imagein"C:\\Program File*"1
Imagein"%systemroot%\\*"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 4 rules