“Process Doppelgänging” Attack Works on All Windows Versions [source: bleepingcomputer]

Today, at the Black Hat Europe 2017 security conference in London, two security researchers from cyber-security firm enSilo have described a new code injection technique called “Process Doppelgänging.”

This new attack works on all Windows versions and researchers say it bypasses most of today’s major security products.

Process Doppelgänging is somewhat similar to another technique called Process Hollowing, but with a twist, as it utilizes the Windows mechanism of NTFS Transactions.

Doppelgänging works by utilizing two key distinct features together to mask the loading of a modified executable. By using NTFS transactions, we make changes to an executable file that will never actually be committed to disk. We will then use undocumented implementation details of the process loading mechanism to load our modified executable, but not before rolling back the changes we made to the executable. The result of this procedure is creating a process from the modified executable, while deployed security mechanisms remain in the dark.

Process Doppelgänging bypasses most modern AVs

Researchers say malicious code that utilizes Process Doppelgänging is never saved to disk (fileless attack), which makes it invisible to all major security products.

Researchers sucessfully tested their attack on products from Kaspersky, Bitdefender, ESET, Symantec, McAfee, Windows Defender, AVG, Avast, Qihoo 360, and Panda. Furthermore, even advanced forensics tools such as Volatility will not detect it.

In their experiments, researchers used Process Doppelgänging to run Mimikatz, a known utility used for password-stealing operations, “in a stealthy way to avoid detection.”

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