Upon watching the surge in attacks of Emotet malware, cybersecurity agencies of France, Japan and New Zealand has issued security alerts over the past week. They warned about engaging with any suspicious emails, where the Emotet plant malicious attachments to infect the systems when opened. It sets backdoor malware that invites other ransomware malwares.
Emotet Attacks Rise Sharply Against New Zealand, Japan and France
Emotet is basically a botnet that targets various people through phishing emails initially. Its sophistication was learned recently as researchers found the Emotet gang is able to steal latest email conversations of a target, and use them to gain trust for their related targets.
This works by stealing conversational emails from a thread, and adding their payload malware to a malicious email and attaching it to the stolen email thread. This gains authenticity from targets, as they believe it to be a continuing conversation and more likely to open the malicious email. Thus, France’s cybersecurity agency, ANSSI has issued a security alert last week asking officials to be attentive on opening any unknown emails.
Government cybersecurity agencies of Japan and New Zealand have issued similar alerts to their own companies and industries about Emotet malware, which has been heavily targeting them in recent days. The group is more like a hit-and-run case, where it sends malicious emails bulky to targets around the world at once, and remain silent for months after that.
It was seen to be so active back in February this year, where it sent about 500,000 emails a day and hibernated until July, where it again went on a spamming spree for a week. The group has now attacking Japan and New Zealand through all its E1, E2 and E3 mini-botnets, and France with E3 mini-botnet as per Joseph Roosen who spoke to ZDNet on this rise.
Since it’s reported to be spamming through phishing emails, all the security alerts released by three countries suggest few common things at the end. They warn about opening any suspicious emails and disconnect all the systems from the network in case affected, and review them individually.
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