Process spoofing is a stealth technique where malware presents itself as a different, harmless-looking process in system tools such as ps, Task Manager, or /proc/<PID>/cmdline. The running code may be malicious, but the visible name, command line, or parent-child relationship is altered to reduce suspicion.
This matters because defenders often rely on process lists for triage. If a threat can disguise its identity, analysts may overlook persistence, credential theft, or command-and-control activity. In real attacks, spoofing is often combined with scheduled tasks, cron jobs, or process injection so the malware starts quietly and blends into normal administration. Defenses focus on behavior rather than names: compare process metadata with signed binaries, file paths, hashes, and launch context; baseline normal activity; and alert on mismatches between a process name and its actual executable location or arguments.