mandiant / mandiant/capa-rules
PPID spoofing via PROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_PARENT_PROCESS not detected
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Description
### What should have matched?
A capability for spawning a process with a spoofed parent process (PPID spoofing).
### What happened?
No relevant capability was detected.
### Why this looks like a miss
The sample uses the classic PPID spoofing flow:
- `InitializeProcThreadAttributeList`
- `UpdateProcThreadAttribute` with `PROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_PARENT_PROCESS`
- `CreateProcess*` with extended startup attributes
This is a common defense-evasion behavior and should be a strong candidate for rule coverage.
### Suggested detection direction
Conservative initial rule requiring co-occurrence of:
1. attribute-list initialization APIs, and
2. parent-process attribute update, and
3. process creation API usage within the same function/scope.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by locating the existing capa rules and tests for Windows process creation, then compare their handling of InitializeProcThreadAttributeList, UpdateProcThreadAttribute, PROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_PARENT_PROCESS, and CreateProcess*. Done means adding conservative coverage that requires all three behavior groups within the same function or scope and verifying it against the PPID-spoofing sample.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Domain
- security
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 52/100