The Emotet Malware is Alive and Using TrickBot to Rebuild its Botnet

The malicious Emotet botnet, which made a comeback in November 2021 after a 10-month break, is showing indications of steady expansion once again, collecting a colony of over 100,000 infected hosts to carry out its destructive actions. 

In a new round of attacks, Emotet, a Banking Trojan which has evolved into a formidable modular threat, has reappeared with improved features. It has infected devices to carry out additional spam campaigns and install various payloads like the QakBot (Qbot) and Trickbot malware. These payloads would subsequently be utilized to give threat actors, such as Ryuk, Conti, ProLock, Egregor, and others, early access to deploy ransomware. 

“While Emotet has not yet reached the same magnitude as before, the botnet is displaying a strong resurrection with a total of around 130,000 unique bots scattered over 179 countries since November 2021,” Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs researchers wrote in a report. On April 25th, 2021, German law enforcement used the network to send an Emotet module that removed the malware from afflicted devices. 

The TrickBot malware has begun to dump an Emotet loader on affected devices, according to Emotet research group Cryptolaemus, GData, and Advanced Intel. While Emotet used to deploy TrickBot, the threat actors now use a mechanism called “Operation Reacharound” by the Cryptolaemus group, which rebuilds the botnet utilizing TrickBot’s current infrastructure. 

Apa

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