Data Privacy Day: Emotet, world's most dangerous malware, disrupted through international coordinated action

Emotet, first found in 2014, has been one of the most professional and long lasting cybercrime services out there.

Moneycontrol News

January 28, 2021 / 12:37 PM IST

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Emotet, the world’s most dangerous malware, has been disrupted ahead of Data Privacy Day 2021. Law enforcement and judicial authorities worldwide worked together to take control of the banking Trojan that, over the years, evolved as the most dangerous malware.

Emotet has been taken down through an international coordinated action. Europol said that the collaborative effort from the authorities in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, Canada and Ukraine helped it take down the malware.

Emotet, first found in 2014, has been one of the most professional and long lasting cybercrime services out there. The malware’s infrastructure acted as a primary door opener for computer systems on a global scale. Once this unauthorised access was established, these were sold to other top-level criminal groups to deploy further illicit activities such data theft and extortion through ransomware, the release stated.

Hackers used emails as an attack vector. The Emotet malware was delivered to the victims’ computers via infected email attachments. These attachments mostly contained malicious Word documents, either attached to the email itself or downloadable by clicking on a link within the email itself. The victims could be prompted to “enable macros” after opening the documents that would allow the malicious code to run and install the Emotet malware on their computer.