"WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS MALWARE, 'EMOTET' DISRUPTED THROUGH GLOBAL ACTION"
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https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/world
WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS MALWARE EMOTET DISRUPTED THROUGH GLOBAL ACTION
27 January 2021
Law enforcement and judicial authorities worldwide have this week disrupted one of most significant botnets of the past decade: EMOTET.
Investigators have now taken control of its infrastructure in an international coordinated action.
This operation is the result of a collaborative effort between authorities in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, Canada and Ukraine, with international activity coordinated by Europol and Eurojust. This operation was carried out in the framework of the European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats (EMPACT).
EMOTET has been one of the most professional and long lasting cybercrime services out there.
First discovered as a banking Trojan in 2014, the
malware evolved into the go-to solution for cybercriminals over the years.
The
EMOTET infrastructure essentially acted as a primary door opener for computer systems on a global scale.
Once this unauthorised access was established, these were sold to other top-level criminal groups to deploy further illicit activities such data theft and extortion through ransomware.
Spread via Word documents
The
EMOTET group managed to take email as an attack vector to a next level. Through a fully automated process,
EMOTET malware was delivered to the victims’ computers via infected e-mail attachments. A variety of different lures were used to trick unsuspecting users into opening these malicious attachments. In the past,
EMOTET email campaigns have also been presented as invoices, shipping notices and information about COVID-19.
All these emails contained malicious Word documents, either attached to the email itself or downloadable by clicking on a link within the email itself.
Once a user opened one of these documents, they could be prompted to “enable macros” so that the malicious code hidden in the Word file could run and install
EMOTET malware on a victim’s computer.
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