Emotet Detection: Infamous Botnet Resurfaces to the Email Threat Landscape

Cybersecurity researchers have observed a burst of the new malicious activity of the Emotet botnet, which has been under the radar for almost half a year. The infamous Trojan attributed to the malicious activity of the TA542 hacking group came back in November 2022, expanding its dominance and impact in the email threat landscape. In the latest campaigns, one of the most destructive Trojans delivers IcedID and BumbleBee loaders on the compromised systems via phishing emails.

Detect Emotet Malware Used in the Most Recent Email Attacks

The notorious Emotet malware poses grave cybersecurity risks to organizations worldwide with its continuously enhancing offensive capabilities and the immense volumes of phishing emails it delivers, reaching hundreds of thousands of samples per day. To ensure that security practitioners are well-armed against the nefarious threat, SOC Prime’s Detection as Code platform for collective cyber defense curates a set of Sigma rules to detect the malicious activity associated with Emotet Trojan. 

All the detections are mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK® framework and are compatible with 25+ industry-leading SIEM, EDR, BDP, and XDR solutions. The detection content is provided both by the SOC Prime Team and our keen Threat Bounty developers, ensuring a variety of algorithms to match your business needs and the technology toolkit in use. 

Become a member of the Threat Bounty Program to write your own Sigma rules mapped to ATT&CK, share them with the global cyber defender community via the world´s largest threat detection marketplace, and receive recurring payouts for contributions. With Threat Bounty, Threat Hunters and Detection Engineers can literally code the perfect CV, network with industry peers, and hone their cybersecurity skills while receiving money for contributing to the collective cyber defense.

To instantly reach Sigma rules for Emotet detection, just click the Explore Detections button. Drill down the comprehensive cyber threat context, including MITRE ATT&CK references, threat intelligence, executable binaries, and mitigations for streamlined threat research.

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Analysis of the Emotet Malware: Overview of the Latest Malicious Campaigns

Emotet, one of the most dangerous Trojans, which has long been a severe menace to global organizations, returns to the cyber threat arena. The malware abuses an email attack vector and is commonly distributed via malicious Excel or Word documents. As soon as compromised users open the latter files and enable macros, the Emotet DLL infects the targeted systems, further spreading other malicious payloads. 

Proofpoint cybersecurity researchers have observed that the Emotet botnet and the payloads it drops have significantly changed in the latest email attack campaigns. The latest Emotet 2022 version leveraged in November attacks applies novel Excel attachments as phishing lures and uses a different binary. The most recent Emotet activity is also distinguished by dropping a novel IcedID loader version along with BumbleBee malware and a notorious XMRig, which is known for mining Monero cryptocurrency.

In addition to the above-mentioned updates, the Emotet loader also applies a set of new commands, an enhanced implementation of the communication loop, and a novel packer with the encrypted payload. The malware’s use of advanced detection evasion techniques via a 64-bit code base makes it a more challenging threat to cyber defenders. 

With the constantly evolving adversary toolkit, the use of a more advanced binary version, and the potential for higher email volumes, the Emotet malware is likely to continuously expand its scope of attacks and remain a severe threat to global organizations. This requires ultra-responsiveness from cyber defenders, which is possible with the power of collective cyber defense.

Equip your team with proactive cyber defense capabilities to know all about emerging cyber threats before they strike and timely identify malicious activity. Learn more at https://socprime.com/ and instantly reach curated Sigma rules to detect threats that matter most with On Demand at https://my.socprime.com/pricing/.