Masquerading: Rename Legitimate Utilities

Threat Actors may rename legitimate / system utilities to try to evade security mechanisms concerning the usage of those utilities. Security monitoring and control mechanisms may be in place for legitimate utilities Threat Actors are capable of abusing, including both built-in binaries and tools such as PSExec, AutoHotKey, and IronPython. It may be possible to bypass those security mechanisms by renaming the utility prior to utilization (ex: rename rundll32.exe). An alternative case occurs when a legitimate utility is copied or moved to a different directory and renamed to avoid detections based on these utilities executing from non-standard paths.

ID: ATAGS-T1100.010
Sub-technique of:  ATAGS-T1100
Tactic: Defense Evasion
Targeted Components: Software
Responsibility: Provider
Created: 18 April 2026
Last Modified: 18 April 2026

Mitigations

This type of attack technique cannot be easily mitigated with preventive controls since it is based on the abuse of system features.