What is ‘EMOTET’, dangerous malware against which 9 nations joined hands?

Team Udayavani, Jan 28, 2021, 11:11 AM IST

The Netherlands, Germany, the US, the UK, France, Lithuania, Canada and Ukraine, with support from Europol, have disrupted one of the world’s most dangerous pieces of malware, ‘EMOTET’.

First discovered as a banking Trojan in 2014, the malware evolved into the go-to solution for cybercriminals. It allowed criminal gangs to install ransomware and steal data from computers.

As reported by Tribune India, The EMOTET infrastructure essentially acted as a primary door opener for computer systems on a global scale.” The Dutch prosecutors said two of the main servers for the infrastructure were based in the Netherlands and a third in another undisclosed country. The national prosecutor’s office said the damage caused by EMOTET runs into the hundreds of millions of euros.

It is said that EMOTET was initially a banking trojan, designed to spy on victims’ computers and steal login details.Victims would receive an apparently important Word document marked for their attention.When opened, it would ask them to “enable Macros”,  a feature built into Microsoft Word that actually opened their computer up to attackers.

The investigators took control of infrastructure behind a botnet called EMOTET. They disrupted Emotet by routing its command-and-control infrastructure to servers they controlled, cutting off criminals from their quarry