Judicial authorities and law enforcement officials from across the world collaborated to disrupt Emotet, the world’s most dangerous malware.
Authorities in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, Canada and Ukraine collaborated to seize thousands of computers running the dangerous malware. These efforts were coordinated by Europol and Eurojust.
One of the most dangerous, resilient, long lasting, and professional cybercrime services, Emotet was first discovered in 2014 as a banking Trojan, which was designed to spy on victims’ computers and steal login details. This network first obtains unauthorized access to the computers of hapless victims via malicious email attachments. Subsequently, it sells this data to other criminal groups to deploy further illegal activities such data theft and extortion through ransomware.
The Emotet malware was made to infect the computers of the victims by means of a fully automated process. Malicious attachments in emails in the forms of invoices, shipping notices, and information about COVID-19 were sent to victims, who if clicked on the email of the attachments enabled the malware on their computers.
The Europol also tweeted about this major victory on cybercrime, saying “huge global operation brings down the world’s most dangerous malware.”
Bye-bye botnets? Huge global operation brings down the world’s most dangerous malware.
Investigators have taken control of the Emotet botnet, the most resilient malware in the wild.
Get the full story: https://t.co/NMrBqmhMIf pic.twitter.com/K28A6ixxuM
— Europol (@Europol) January 27, 2021
According to Europol, “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 take down this robust infrastructure, officials collaborated, creating an effective operational strategy to take the network down from the inside. Interestingly, the machines of victims that were infected with this malware were redirected towards this law enforcement-controlled infrastructure, a new manner to damage the activities of cybercriminals.
Many thanks to all the officials from across the world for making the cyberspace safer and better. Have you ever been a victim of such malware? Let us know in the comments section below.
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