What is pe-sieve?

PE-sieve is a Windows security tool that scans a running process on your computer and looks for signs that it has been tampered with by malicious software. When malware infects a system it often does so by injecting hidden code into legitimate programs that are already running, or by swapping out part of a legitimate program's code in memory with its own. PE-sieve is designed to detect those modifications and extract the suspicious code so that a security researcher can examine it further. Specifically, the tool looks for several known attack techniques: Process Hollowing, where a legitimate program's code is replaced with malware, Reflective DLL Injection, where a malicious library loads itself into another process without going through normal Windows loading procedures, Process Doppelganging, a more advanced variation that abuses Windows file transaction features, and inline hooks, where short pieces of code are inserted into legitimate functions to redirect what they do. When PE-sieve finds any of these, it can dump the suspicious memory regions to disk as files for offline analysis. The tool is built to be lightweight and focused: it scans one process at a time. It can run as a standalone command-line program or be compiled as a library that other applications can call through a simple API, making it useful as an engine inside larger security products. Two companion tools extend what it can do: HollowsHunter wraps PE-sieve to scan all processes on a system at once, and MalUnpack uses it to unpack obfuscated malware samples. PE-sieve runs only on Windows and is written in C++. It is available as a prebuilt download from the releases page or through the Chocolatey and Scoop package managers. The project is open-source under the BSD 2-Clause license.