A system and method is disclosed for injecting in-process agents into processes executing self-contained, statically linked binaries that do not interact with a dynamic loader mechanism that identifies and resolves required libraries at run time. System calls directed to the execution of binaries in processes are intercepted and the targeted binary is analyzed to determine whether it is statically linked. In case a statically linked binary is identified, a proxy launcher process is started instead of the binary which starts the original binary as traceable child process. After the child process has loaded the original binary into its process memory, the memory image of the child process is copied to the launcher process and the child process is terminated. An agent is loaded into the launcher process to instruments the copied memory image. After the instrumentation is finished, the original start conditions for the statically linked binary are reconstructed and the entry function of the instrumented statically linked binary is called to execute the binary.