CISA Warns of Emotet Malware Attacks Targeting Government Entities Via Weaponized Word Documents

CISA observes a significant increase in Emotet malware attacks that steals login credentials from various browsers, email clients, and applications.

The malware was first observed in mid-2014 as a banking Trojan, it is one of the most notorious email-based malware that offers several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks as a service.

Earlier this year authorities from France, Japan, and New Zealand observed a sudden spike with the Emotete malware infection targeting several companies and administrations.

CISA Alert

CISA released an alert that Emotet attacks resurged in July 2020, they able to see a “significant increase in malicious cyber actors targeting state and local governments with Emotet phishing emails.”

Emotet is an advanced trojan that is distributed via phishing email attachments, once clicked it penetrates the network by brute-forcing user credentials and writing to shared drives.

Its worm-like capabilities enable network-wide infections, also it uses modular Dynamic Link Libraries to continuously update its capabilities.

“Since July 2020, CISA has seen increased activity involving Emotet-associated indicators. During that time, CISA’s EINSTEIN Intrusion Detection System, which protects federal, civilian executive branch networks, has detected roughly 16,000 alerts related to Emotet activity.”

In the campaigns, Emotet used malicious word documents attached to phishing emails as initial insertion vectors, and the communication with the C&C server handled via an HTTP post request.

Communication With the C&C server occurs most over ports 80, 8080, 443, and in some cases over port 445. CISA warned users to stay safe as this notorious malware may occur anytime.

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