Displaying items by tag: emotet

Yesterday we told you that the gang behind Emotet was looking to used Excel add-ins as a possible new technique to compromise systems as part of their spamming campaigns. The detected techniques were labeled as potentially being part of research and development efforts on the part of the group TA542 due to changes Microsoft is making in Office (and ones many admins already push). The R&D efforts do not stop there though as multiple security research teams are now saying they have identified another new technique associated with Emotet.

TA542 the wonderful people that brought you Emotet appears to be in the middle of a development and testing cycle on new delivery methods. According to researchers at ProofPoint the creators or the Emotet Botnet are potentially looking to find a new delivery method in response to the, long overdue, default disabling of VBA based Macros by Microsoft in their office products. Although ProofPoint seems to think this is development testing, the activity could also be part of a more targeted campaign.

Emotet, (not to be confused with Imhotep the ancient Egyptian Polymath) was originally identified in 2014 and quickly became one of the top threats of the decade. After an early start as a banking trojan, the group amassed a huge number of bots that it was able to leverage to execute attacks on targets. This bot infrastructure was then sold as a service to other groups as part of a malware-as-a-Service model. The prevalence and reach of Emotet was enough that in early 2021 the global law enforcement and cyber security community targeted Emotet’s infrastructure and people that had been identified as part of the group. It was a significant hit to the organization.

Researchers have identified Trickbot in use in campaigns targeting several financial institutions. These groups along with a few tech companies thrown in a predominantly in the US and appear to be using an evolved version of the malware to get in and avoid detection by legacy anti-malware (signature based). It is usually part of a targeted spearphishing campaign where poisoned office documents are either contain links to malicious websites or can contain HTA code to execute a PowerShell command to download the second stage of the malware.

In a list of things that should be killed with fire, Excel 4.0 Macros are high up. However, the fat that Spamming “services” like Emotet are still using Excel 4.0 Macros tells me that some are not getting the hint. According to recent research from TrendMicro, Emotet is using some very unconventional methods of obfuscating the C2 server IP addresses. The attack patter is the same, email with a poisoned Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet contains HTA with the command script, you know the drill.