Emotet

Emotet is a modular Windows malware family that began as a banking Trojan in 2014 and evolved into one of the most capable and widely used botnets in cybercrime. It is designed to steal credentials and sensitive information, harvest email data, and serve as a loader for other malicious payloads. Emotet’s core strength lies in its modular architecture, allowing operators to update and extend its functionality without a full redeployment.

The primary distribution method is spam email. Messages often imitate legitimate communications and include malicious attachments (such as Word or Excel documents with macros) or links to download malware. Once installed, Emotet can extract information from hosts, fetch contact lists from email clients, and spread laterally via compromised credentials and network data. It can also download and execute additional payloads, acting as a delivery mechanism for other criminal software, including TrickBot, QakBot, and ransomware families. Emotet’s modules enable credential harvesting, web injects, and data exfiltration, and it can communicate with command-and-control servers to receive updates and new modules.

Impact and history: Emotet has caused extensive financial and operational damage by enabling large-scale credential theft and by facilitating subsequent malware campaigns. In January 2021, authorities disrupted its infrastructure in a multinational operation, temporarily reducing activity, with variants and campaigns re-emerging in the following years. As of the mid-2020s, Emotet campaigns continued to surface, often as a loader for other threats. Prevention emphasizes user education, disabling macros by default, robust email filtering, network segmentation, updated endpoint protection, and regular backups.