What could the negative effects be of attaching to a process as a debugger?
- by I_like_traffic_lights
Background
A client of mine has a major problem. They have a CRM system, which was created by a single person over a period of 9 years. Unfortunatelly, a few weeks ago, this person died. I believe the company has learned their lesson, and they have started a project of rewriting the CRM system to a modern platform. I have been hired to create a solution in the meantime to make adaptations to the CRM system. I have given up understanding the code, as this would take too long. My solution, is therefore, to make a window and show this on top of the CRM system, whenever this CRM system is showing. This part works fine, but my major problem is extracting the data from the CRM system.
Proposed solution
After excluding 6 approaches, including runtime code injection, memory searching, database integration, I have arrived at attaching to the process as a debugger, so I get notified about event, and use this in combination with reading from process memory. This approach seems to work, but I am worried about possible side-effects of this approach.
Question
What are the dangers of using this in a production environment, where there are 250 employees utilizing the system. Needless to say, I cannot risk reducing the already shaky stability of the system.
