T1055.013sub-technique of T1055 Process Injection

Process Doppelgänging

Windowsnothing on this site yetT1055.013 on attack.mitre.org

Adversaries may inject malicious code into process via process doppelgänging in order to evade process-based defenses as well as possibly elevate privileges. Process doppelgänging is a method of executing arbitrary code in the address space of a separate live process. Windows Transactional NTFS (TxF) was introduced in Vista as a method to perform safe file operations.
MITRE ATT&CK 19.2, retrieved 2026-09-12

If this is happening now

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

Detection Strategy for Process Doppelgänging on Windows

Detects adversary abuse of Transactional NTFS (TxF) and undocumented process loading mechanisms (e.g., NtCreateProcessEx) to create a hollowed process from an uncommitted, maliciously tainted file image in memory, later executed via NtCreateThreadEx.

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

T1055.001 Dynamic-link Library Injection · not covered yet
T1055.002 Portable Executable Injection · not covered yet
T1055.003 Thread Execution Hijacking · not covered yet
T1055.004 Asynchronous Procedure Call · not covered yet
T1055.005 Thread Local Storage · not covered yet
T1055.008 Ptrace System Calls · not covered yet
T1055.009 Proc Memory · not covered yet
T1055.011 Extra Window Memory Injection · not covered yet
T1055.012 Process Hollowing · not covered yet
T1055.014 VDSO Hijacking · not covered yet
T1055.015 ListPlanting · not covered yet

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.