When impersonating an expected task, the adversary monitors the task list maintained by the operating system and waits for a specific legitimate task to become active. Once the task is detected, the malicious application launches a new task in the foreground that mimics the user interface of the legitimate task. At this point, the user thinks that they are interacting with the legitimate task that they started, but instead they are interacting with the malicious application. Once the adversary's goal is reached, the malicious application can exit, leaving the original trusted application visible and the appearance that nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.

A second approach entails the adversary impersonating an unexpected task, but one that may often be spawned by legitimate background processes. For example, an adversary may randomly impersonate a system credential prompt, implying that a background process requires authentication for some purpose. The user, believing they are interacting with a legitimate task, enters their credentials or authorizes the use of their stored credentials, which the adversary then leverages for nefarious purposes. This type of attack is most often used to obtain sensitive information (e.g., credentials) from the user, but may also be used to ride the user's privileges.