Break Process Trees

Break Process Trees is a powerful sub-technique under the Deepening Control/Masquerading phase where attackers deliberately manipulate or sever process lineage relationships to obscure their activities from security monitoring. In typical operating system environments, processes maintain parent-child relationships forming hierarchical trees that security tools use for detection and forensic analysis. By breaking these process trees through techniques such as orphaning processes, leveraging process injection to execute code in legitimate processes, using alternate parent process specifications, or exploiting PPIDs (Parent Process IDs) spoofing, attackers can make their malicious processes appear unrelated to their source. This effectively masks the true execution flow, confuses automated analysis systems, and complicates incident response efforts. The technique is particularly effective against security solutions that rely on process tree analysis for anomaly detection, as the disconnected processes no longer maintain their incriminating lineage to the original attack vector.