Did you know malware can hide inside a process your computer already trusts. it's called process hollowing. Here's how it works. Windows runs hundreds of processes in the background. svchost.exe. explorer.exe. legitimate system programs. security tools trust them by name. network connections from svchost.exe are normal background noise. same connections from unknown.exe trigger alerts immediately. attackers exploit that trust. step one: malware launches a legitimate process, say svchost.exe but pauses it before it runs a single line of code. suspended. sitting in memory. doing nothing yet. step two: malware carves out the legitimate code from inside that process. empties it. hollows it out. step three: injects its own malicious code into the empty space. step four: resumes the process. now malicious code is running. but Windows sees svchost.exe. the task manager sees svchost.exe. your antivirus sees svchost.exe. the file on disk is the real, clean, signed Microsoft executable. nothing on disk is malicious. the malicious code only exists in memory. and the process has inherited svchost's identity, its access token, its whitelisted status, and its right to make network connections without raising alarms. TrickBot used it. Emotet used it. multiple ransomware loaders use it. The defense is memory analysis, not file scanning. EDR tools that watch for processes whose memory contents don't match the executable on disk. But organizations are still scanning files.