Top 5 Techniques of Hackers
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. ~ Sun Tzu in The Art of War”
Just like this, in threat detection 101, understanding an attacker’s techniques is half the battle. Here are five critical techniques that every SOC analyst should watch for in 2025:
1. PowerShell Abuse
- Leveraged for stealthy execution, privilege escalation, and payload delivery, it always ace the ranking of most favourite hackers’ techniques.
- Monitor encoded commands, unusual script execution, and outbound network connections.
2. WMI Exploitation
- Persistence, remote execution, and lateral movement… that’s WMI exploitation for you.
- Monitor unexpected WMI event subscriptions and excessive wmic.exe usage.
3. Process Injection
- The art of hiding malicious code inside legitimate processes to evade detection is known as Process Injection.
- Better keep an eye on the signs of memory modifications, suspicious child processes, and abnormal process creation.
4. LSASS Memory Dumping
- Yes… extracting credentials from system memory using is not a difficult task for Mimikatz.
- Should be definitely looking out for unauthorized access to lsass.exe, suspicious memory reads, and process handle requests.
5. Service Execution
- Sometimes, adversaries create or modify services for persistence and execution.
- Monitoring unusual service creation, execution from non-standard paths, and privilege escalation attempts always counts as a good practice for SOC Analysts.