Our products include self-protection mechanisms to prevent tampering with our files, folders, processes, registry entries, and executables. Self-protection mechanisms are needed to provide and maintain a high level of security and trust in the software, especially to secure against malware attacks.
Some third-party software applications might inject or "hook" our processes, or attempt to, by loading their own code (a DLL) into the our process. Third-party applications might use hooking techniques as a means to provide more functionality to the user or administrator. But there is no legitimate reason for hooking our protected system-level services.
While this behavior is similar to a malware attack, from the viewpoint of the third-party vendor, the third-party application is just behaving as expected. It is providing functionality that supports the purpose of the third-party application. Third-party vendors recognize that they do not need to hook all processes, and many provide a compatibility setting that allows excluding specific processes from being injected with their code.
Adverse effects can occur when untrusted third-party code injects or hooks our protected services. Known issues include system deadlocks requiring manual remediation.
