Law enforcement and judicial authorities worldwide have disrupted one of the 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.
EMOTET has been one of the most professional and long-lasting cybercrime services around. 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 unauthorized access was established, these were sold to other top-level criminal groups to deploy further their illicit activities such as data theft and extortion through ransomware.
The EMOTET group managed to take email as an attack vector to the next level. Through a fully automated process, EMOTET malware was delivered to the victims’ computers via infected email 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.
EMOTET was much more than just a malware. What made EMOTET so dangerous is that the malware was offered for hire to other cybercriminals to install other types of malware, such as banking Trojans or ransomwares, onto a victim’s computer.
This type of attack is called a ‘loader’ operation, and EMOTET is said to be one of the biggest players in the cybercrime world as other malware operators like TrickBot and Ryuk have benefited from it. Its unique way of infecting networks by spreading the threat laterally after gaining access to just a few devices in the network made it very resilient.
The infrastructure that was used by EMOTET involved several hundreds of servers located across the world, all of these having different functionalities in order to manage the computers of the infected victims, to spread to new ones, to serve other criminal groups, and to ultimately make the network more resilient against takedown attempts.
To severely disrupt the EMOTET infrastructure, law enforcement came together to create an effective operational strategy. It resulted in this week’s action that saw law enforcement and judicial authorities gain control of the infrastructure and take it down from the inside. The infected machines of victims have been redirected towards this law enforcement-controlled infrastructure.
Many botnets like EMOTET are polymorphic in nature. This means that the malware changes its code each time it is called up. Since many antivirus programs scan the computer for known malware codes, a code change may cause difficulties for its detection, allowing the infection to go initially undetected.
A combination of both updated cybersecurity tools (antivirus and operating systems) and cybersecurity awareness is essential to avoid falling victim to sophisticated botnets like EMOTET. Users should carefully check their email and avoid opening messages and especially attachments from unknown senders. If a message seems too good to be true, it likely is and emails that implore a sense of urgency should be avoided at all costs.
As part of the criminal investigation conducted by the Dutch National Police into EMOTET, a database containing email addresses, usernames and passwords stolen by EMOTET was discovered. Anyone who thinks they may have been targeted can check if their e-mail address has been compromised at the Dutch National Police. As part of the global remediation strategy, in order to initiate the notification of those affected and the cleaning up of the systems, information was distributed worldwide via the network of Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs).
Read the announcement at Europol
