Thankfully PM has a range of filters that can include or exclude data from the output. This is due to the fact that hundreds of events can occur per second, and letting malware run for 10-15 minutes will produce hundreds of thousands of events that are logged. With that being said, the output from Process Monitor can be a bit overwhelming (to say the least) if you don’t know how to use it.

is an alternative to using PID files and uses process name pattern matching to find the process to monitor.

If the pid-file does not exist or does not contain the PID number of a running process, Monit will call the entrys start method if defined. Plus, all of the output can be exported out to a file for later viewing, which makes life pretty simple. A pid-file is a file, containing a Processs unique ID. It can be used as a very detailed timeline for malware execution, or set to display the activity associated with a targeted process. It monitors as much or as little activity as you want. “Proces Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, registry, and process/thread activity” For anyone performing dynamic (live) analysis of malware, an essential tool to have at hand is Windows Sysinternal’s Process Monitor. So why is this a must for malware analysis? The website describes the tool best:

Process monitor filter file accesss