In this week’s Tech Talk Tuesday, cybersecurity expert Dan Gunter takes us on a practical journey through one of the most valuable free tools available to threat hunters and incident responders: Process Hacker. This article outlines the key functions and use cases of the tool, particularly in the context of security analysis.
Process Hacker is a free, multi-purpose system monitoring tool that enables users to:
Analyze running processes and their behavior
Debug software
Detect malware and suspicious activity
Inspect system resources, memory, network ports, and file handles
Available on SourceForge, it can be installed or run as a portable application, making it useful even in restricted environments.
A key point highlighted early on: permissions matter. Running Process Hacker with administrative rights reveals full system-level visibility, including processes owned by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. Without such rights, visibility is limited to user-level processes—critical for thorough malware analysis and incident response.
One of the most powerful features of Process Hacker is its process tree view, which shows parent-child relationships.
Allows quick behavioral assessments.
Identifies oddities—e.g., a command prompt (cmd.exe) launched under Microsoft Word or Excel could be a red flag for phishing or exploitation.
Double-clicking a suspicious process opens its properties tab, revealing essential attributes:
Command line arguments (great for spotting obfuscated PowerShell scripts or base64 payloads)
Working directory
Memory and security configurations
Parent process relationships
Tokens define what permissions a process has. Attackers may exploit processes with elevated tokens to escalate privileges. This tab helps assess:
Which tokens are in use
Whether attackers are abusing them
Live permission changes and revocation tests
Modules (DLLs) show what external code a process is loading. This includes:
Legitimate Windows DLLs
Third-party libraries
Malicious DLLs injected by attackers
Example: In the 2016 Ukraine energy attack, attackers used malicious DLLs to execute control commands. Process Hacker would have shown these DLLs clearly in the module list.
Provides:
Access type (read-only, read/write)
Memory segment locations
Memory dump options for forensic tools like Volatility or Bulk Extractor
This is particularly useful for analyzing memory injection or in-memory-only malware.
Shows interaction with OS handles, including:
Files
Registry keys
Mutexes (used by malware for persistence)
Semaphores
This data is essential for detecting persistence mechanisms like Run key modifications or mutex-based infection checks.
Process Hacker isn’t just for observation. It supports live actions such as:
Terminating processes
Modifying permissions
Revoking tokens
This makes it a valuable utility for active incident response in a secure environment.
This video focused on exploring processes in Process Hacker. In the next Tech Talk Tuesday, Dan promises to delve deeper into network connections and services—critical components for advanced threat detection.
Process Hacker is a must-have for security professionals. It combines system observability with practical controls for threat detection and response. Whether you’re a SOC analyst, incident responder, or security researcher, this tool deserves a spot in your toolbox.
To keep up with the latest in cybersecurity and forensic analysis, follow Insane Cyber and explore their research.
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