A group of cyber criminals working under the title ‘EMOTET’ have had thousands of devices seized in one of the biggest coordinated attacks on cybercrime that the world has seen.
This operation is the result of a collaborative effort between authorities across a number of countries who have been on the trail of the cyber criminals for several years.
EMOTET has been one of the most well organised and enduring cybercrime organisations in the world. They were first noticed in 2014 when they released a banking Trojan, and since then, have been selling malware to criminal organisations to carry out further unlawful activities such data theft and extortion through ransomware.
One of the more common methods used by EMOTET is to deploy the malware via email attachments. The user receives an apparently innocent looking email with a Word document attached. The user is then asked to enable macros within the document on opening it, and that is when the malicious code hidden within the file is executed.
The infrastructure that was used by EMOTET involved several hundreds of servers located across the world, configured in a way that made them more resilient against takedown attempts. The sophistication of this set-up makes the work done by the authorities to take it down all the more impressive.
This story serves to highlight two key points. The first is that cyber criminals are becoming more and more sophisticated and it is vital that you have the right protection in place to do everything you can to prevent, detect and respond to these threats.
The second key point is that awareness and training within your teams is critical, so they recognise suspicious emails and know how to deal with them appropriately.
At Fundamentals First we have security solutions that will protect you and your teams at any time of the day, as well providing awareness training to ensure your teams are fully prepared. If your organisation would like help in developing a solution that secures your people and your data 24×7, then get in touch with Fundamentals First to discuss how our experienced Consultants can help.
