Hexacorn

This is an idea I have not tested in practice, but it emerged in response to a simple question:

• What if sysmon, 4688, EDR command line logging couldn’t catch a thing?

I am not the first one to ask this question and @_xpn_ has a great post about an argument spoofing trick one can use to fool command line interceptors: create a suspended process, then inject a proper command line argument after the process creation event has been intercepted, then resume the process with the new command line injected.
Brilliant!

So… that made me think about what command line really is.

And command line is basically a string that is being parsed to set up a internal state for the program that parses it. And with that we can ask another question: is there a way to manipulate the process state and assign appropriate values to internal engine of the targeted tool and make it run as if a command line argument was provided, but without providing that command line? Of course, to do so one needs to know intricacies of the process that is being manipulated but it’s relatively straightforward for targets like powershell (source code available), or even v|cbscript / cmd.

Perhaps there is a scope for a completely new type of offensive engine that takes instrumentation to a completely new level…