T1480.002

Description

Adversaries may constrain execution or actions based on the presence of a mutex associated with malware. A mutex is a locking mechanism used to synchronize access to a resource.

Only one thread or process can acquire a mutex at a given time. While local mutexes only exist within a given process, allowing multiple threads to synchronize access to a resource, system mutexes can be used to synchronize the activities of multiple processes.

By creating a unique system mutex associated with a particular malware, adversaries can verify whether or not a system has already been compromised. In Linux environments, malware may instead attempt to acquire a lock on a mutex file.

If the malware is able to acquire the lock, it continues to execute; if it fails, it exits to avoid creating a second instance of itself. Mutex names may be hard-coded or dynamically generated using a predictable algorithm.