Feb 15, 2021
Check Point Research’s latest Global Threat Index for January 2021 has revealed the Emotet trojan has remained in first place in the top malware list for the second month running, impacting 6% of organisations globally, despite an international police operation which took control of the botnet on 27 January.
The police takedown caused a 14% decrease in the number of organizations that were impacted by Emotet activity, and law enforcement agencies plan to mass-uninstall Emotet from infected hosts on 25 April. Even so, Emotet maintained the top position in the Global Threat Index, highlighting the vast global impact this botnet has had. Emotet’s malicious spam campaign uses different delivery techniques to spread Emotet, including embedded links, document attachments, or password-protected Zip files.
Jan 8, 2021
The Emotet trojan has returned to first place in Check Point Research’s latest Global Three Index for December 2020, impacting 7% of organisations globall.
This follows a spam campaign which targeted more than 100 000 users per day during the holiday season.
In September and October 2020, Emotet was consistently at the top of the Global Threat Index, and was linked to a wave of ransomware attacks. But in November it was much less prevalent, dropping to fifth place in the Index.
Researchers state that it has now been updated with new malicious payloads and improved detection evasion capabilities: the latest version creates a dialogue box, which helps it evade detection by users.