Host-based code injection attacks: A popular technique used by malware

Abstract

Common goals of malware authors are detection avoidance and gathering of critical information. There exist numerous techniques that help these actors to reach their goals. One especially popular technique is the Host-Based Code Injection Attack (HBCIA). According to our research 63.94% out of a malware set of 162850 samples use HBCIAs. The act of locally copying malicious code into a foreign process space and subsequently executing it is called a Host-Based Code Injection Attack. In this paper, we define HBCIAs and introduce a taxonomy for HBCIA algorithms. We show that a HBCIA algorithm can be broken down into three steps. In total there are four classes of HBCIA algorithms. Then we examine a huge set of malware samples and estimate the prevalence of HBCIA-employing malware and their target process distribution. Moreover, we analyse Intrusion Prevention System data and show that HBCIA-employing malware prefers network-related processes for its network communication. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to thoroughly describe and formalize this phenomenon and give an estimation of its prevalence. Thus, we build a solid foundation for future work on this topic.