I will write another post on best practices for Process Monitor. In this blog post I just want to explain some useful tricks and features that I use most often when working with Process Explorer. You should however always keep in mind that you might be dealing with some kind of virus or malware that hides from Process Explorer and Process Monitor or that circumvents detection by manipulating the system on kernel level.īy the way, if you are interested in a real-world example, I can recommend Mark Russinovich’s (slightly dated) series ( part 1, part 2, part 3) on analyzing Stuxnet with Sysinternals. Especially in situations where clients got a SIEM alert that a workstation communicated with a malicious website but then cannot find anything suspicious on the system itself, I recommend to run Process Explorer and Process Monitor to find out more about the threads running on the system and to see which program is responsible for the potentially malicious connection attempts. Process Monitor on the other hand is something what I would call “ SIEM for processes” because it shows in realtime all system activity (files, registry, network, processes and threads) and allows to filter and search for “threats in the threads”. Mark Russinovich calls Process Explorer a “Super Task Manager” because of it’s great functionality to analyze processes and threads. Also for system scanning, there are many other tools, for example LOKI IoC Scanner, but for a quick start and a straightforward user experience, Process Explorer and Process Monitor are a good choice to get a quick understanding of what certain software is doing on your system. For hardcode forensics you would probably want to use other tools. Process Explorer and Process Monitor are two software solutions from the Sysinternals bundle which allow to look very deeply into what is happening in your Windows system. Apparently someone with a strong technical background in this C-level position. Moreover, it comes from a trusted source (Microsoft) and does not require too much training.įun fact: The original developer of Sysinternals – Mark Russinovich – is now CTO for Microsoft Azure. Really all of the included tools (of the many I tried so far) are very helpful for specific purposes and it does not come as a surprise that Microsoft bought the previously independent company “Winternals” years ago.įor my work as Security Consultant I also like to recommend these tools to my clients because the software is self-contained, i.e. The Sysinternals suite is a toolkit that can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website.

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