- If you’ve followed the history of malware in recent years, you will definitely have heard of Emotet, and you’ll have a very good idea of what happens next to Emotet victims if the malware breaches their defences.
- That’s because “what happens next” could be anything – pretty much anything at all off the cybercrime menu – because Emotet is what’s known as a bot or zombie.
- Some botherders – the jargon name given to the crooks in charge of a network of zombies, known colloquially as a botnet – use the zombie computers that they control for their own immediate criminal purposes.
- Botnet-triggered criminality includes: sending mass spam deliveries ; launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against companies or service providers; perpetrating click fraud involving millions of legitimate-looking ad clicks; and much more.
- The Emotet crew, however, generally play the game a bit differently.
- They typically use the zombies under their control as a sort of content delivery network for other cybercriminals, offering what amounts to a pay-to-play service for malware distribution.
- Good news – a co-ordinated, multinational takedown effort against the network intrastructure used by the Emotet gang.
- The bad news is that cybercrime, to borrow a metaphor often applied to nature, abhors a vacuum, so that when one gang of cybercrooks gets shut down, others inevitably move in to try to fill the hole.
– Paul Ducklin | February 1, 2021
