Cybersecurity agents warn against the sudden spike in Emotet spam campaigns targeting businesses in France, New Zealand and Japan over the past week.
Cybersecurity agents warn against the sudden spike in Emotet spam campaigns targeting businesses in France, New Zealand and Japan over the past week.
The French national cyber-security agency issued an alert to warn of a crucial spike of Emotet attacks and instructing government agencies to pay attention to the emails they are opening.
“Special alert should be paid to this because Emotet is now used to deploy other malicious code that may have a strong impact on the activity of victims, ” reads the alert published by ANSSI (Agence Nationale de la Sécurité Des Systèmes d’Information).
New Zealand's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) also published an alert regarding the increased Emotet activity affecting New Zealand organisations.
“The emails contain malicious attachments or links that the receiver is encouraged to download. These links and attachments may look like genuine invoices, financial documents, shipping information, resumes, scanned documents or information on COVID-19, but they are fake, ” stated New Zealand CERT.
Japan’s CERT (JPCERT/CC) also cautioned Emotet sightings tripled last week, in the number of domestic domain (.jp) email addresses that have been infected with the malware that can be employed to send spam emails to spread the infection further.
The attackers appear to be the same in all three alerts. The Emotet seems to have used Windows Word Documents (.doc) and password-protected ZIP archive files as malicious attachments attacks that have been seen targeting businesses in other countries as well.
Emotet operators used their old trick of infecting a victim and then stealing order threads. The group would then restart those old conversations, add malicious files as attachments, and target new users with a seemingly valid conversation.
Users in conversations, or those added, often opened malicious attachments added to the thread out of curiosity and got infected.
According to cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, Emotet will switch to target and attack other countries as the botnet can send spam in multiple languages.
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