Reportedly, the new technique used in these Emotet-driven attacks involves installing the Cobalt Strike beacons, attempting to contact a remote domain, then uninstalling the beacons.
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Until now, Emotet would only deploy certain trojans onto the targeted devices, such as QBot or TrickBot, which would then let the cybercriminals drop Cobalt Strike beacons or carry out other harmful operations on the systems.Įmotet, deemed one of the most dangerous malware strains in the world, spreads mainly through spam emails, macro-enabled Word or Excel documents, and malicious scripts and links.Įven though Cobalt Strike has been historically used as a legitimate penetration testing solution, threat actors have been using cracked versions to deploy beacons on vulnerable devices for various malicious purposes, such as unauthorized remote network surveillance or to execute payloads. However, with Emotet skipping the middleman, the delay is likely to be shorter or even non-existent.
In a typical attack, users would have a more generous timeframe of about a month between the initial infection and ransomware. Cybercriminals can now gain instant access to networks compromised by the infamous Emotet malware by installing Cobalt Strike beacons directly on infected machines, a security report revealed this week.Įmotet research group Cryptolaemus has confirmed that, instead of taking the regular route of dropping Cobalt Strike beacons through intermediate QakBot or TrickBot payloads, Emotet now deploys the beacons directly onto compromised devices.
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