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T1055.003sub-technique of T1055 Process Injection

Thread Execution Hijacking

Windowsnothing on this site yetT1055.003 on attack.mitre.org

Adversaries may inject malicious code into hijacked processes in order to evade process-based defenses as well as possibly elevate privileges. Thread Execution Hijacking is a method of executing arbitrary code in the address space of a separate live process. Thread Execution Hijacking is commonly performed by suspending an existing process then unmapping/hollowing its memory, which can then be replaced with malicious code or the path to a DLL.

MITRE ATT&CK 19.2, retrieved 2026-09-12

If this is happening now

1

Checklists and playbooks to open while the alert is still live.

Playbook for this stage

Cloud account compromise

Impossible travel, an unrecognised inbox rule, or a reported invoice-fraud attempt.

how MITRE says to see it

Behavioral Detection of Thread Execution Hijacking via Thread Suspension and Context Switching

  • Detects hijacking of an existing thread (OpenThread) through a behavioral chain involving thread suspension (SuspendThread), memory modification (VirtualAllocEx + WriteProcessMemory), context manipulation (SetThreadContext), and thread resumption, all within another live process's address space (ResumeThread).

what reduces it

  • M1040 Behavior Prevention on Endpoint. Some endpoint security solutions can be configured to block some types of process injection based on common sequences of behavior that occur during the injection process.

the rest of T1055

The description, detection analytics and mitigations are reproduced from MITRE ATT&CK, version 19.2, under its terms of use. The checklists, hunts, labs and everything else linked here are this site’s.