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T1055.003: T1055.003

View on MITRE ATT&CK The MITRE Corporation · Published 16/12/2025 19:37 · Modified 20/04/2026 12:51

Essential information

MITRE technique ID
T1055.003
Confidence
100/100
Revoked
No
Published
16/12/2025 19:37
Modified
20/04/2026 12:51
Author / Source
The MITRE Corporation

Aliases

Thread Execution Hijacking

Platforms

windows

Description

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. A handle to an existing victim process is first created with native Windows API calls such as `OpenThread`. At this point the process can be suspended then written to, realigned to the injected code, and resumed via `SuspendThread `, `VirtualAllocEx`, `WriteProcessMemory`, `SetThreadContext`, then `ResumeThread` respectively.(Citation: Elastic Process Injection July 2017) This is very similar to [Process Hollowing](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1055/012) but targets an existing process rather than creating a process in a suspended state. Running code in the context of another process may allow access to the process's memory, system/network resources, and possibly elevated privileges. Execution via Thread Execution Hijacking may also evade detection from security products since the execution is masked under a legitimate process.

Kill chain phases

Kill chainPhase
mitre-attack defense-evasion
mitre-attack privilege-escalation

Marking (TLP)

TLP:CLEAR Copyright 2015-2025, The MITRE Corporation. MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation.

External references