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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Windows has far worse. Injecting code into other processes is routine and almost impossible to get rid of.

Readers here are all very likely to appreciate some links alongside statements, cause really this is a sensitive topic. Both statements need certain context as it seems it’s not the universal understanding of what goes on and how often.

SetWindowsHookEx is a blast.

Not sure it can be proven with citations but it's well known that process injection is widely used on Windows. GPU drivers are known to do it. Utilities have historically often injected code into Explorer. Raymond Chen has written in the past about this problem and how hard it made it to evolve the platform.

> Raymond Chen has written in the past about this problem

That would be a citation. Do you have a link?

You install tortoiseSVN or something similar, look at explorer.exe process or any process that use a standard "Open File" widget, and you will see some dll from the utility loaded by the process. (Easy to see with process explorer from sysinternals)

I think tortoiseSVN and consorts are "just" a shell extension, though, which is an officially supported concept, even if that means that potentially any random software using the standard file dialogues ends up loading your DLL, too.

Three random Explorer examples:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230911-00/?p=10...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230324-00/?p=10...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220613-00/?p=10...

For code injection into applications that don't load third-party DLLs as plugins, see, e.g., Microsoft's (unsupported) toolkit for runtime API interception:

https://github.com/microsoft/Detours

I've never heard of that from store apps

The store which doesn't even provide one of the most useful Microsoft product (Visual Studio)?

Yeah. That really doesn’t need to be from the store.

I really hate going through the Apple Store to download Xcode. We all know how to download software. I’d rather go through a dev portal than a consumer portal.

YMMV

Xcode can be downloaded from developer.apple.com too, it's not an App Store exclusive.

Command line: https://github.com/XcodesOrg/xcodes

GUI: https://github.com/XcodesOrg/XcodesApp

> I’d rather go through a dev portal than a consumer portal.

You actually can, alongside with conmand line tools, additional xcode utils, debug kernels et cetera.

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