Access denied error when using VirtualQueryEx

Question

So, I wrote a program which is able to successfully read memory from most of processes using VirtualQueryEx. However, I've come across a process for which this function fails. It's not a system process, just a game process. Without Debug privileges I couldn't even open the process's handle. With them I am able to get the process's handle but still get access denied for VirtualQueryEx.

I'm not sure but maybe the process is private? If that's the case, what should I do to successfully use VirtualQueryEx function?

I've also read somewhere that I might have to suspend whole process's threads before running VirtualQueryEx, but so far I didn't need that... And when I used function Thread32First to get the first thread it gave me an error: ERROR_BAD_LENGTH...

I would be very grateful for any help in this matter!

Answer 1

How are you opening the process handle? From the doc:

The handle must have been opened with the PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION access right, which enables using the handle to read information from the process object.

Another possibility is that the target process and your process are different bitness (32 vs 64). In that case you either need to use MEMORY_BASIC_INFORMATION32 or something like VirtualQueryEx64 from wow64ext library.