The insidious Emotet botnet, which staged a return in November 2021 after a 10-month-long hiatus, is once again exhibiting signs of steady growth, amassing a swarm of over 100,000 infected hosts for perpetrating its malicious activities.
“While Emotet has not yet attained the same scale it once had, the botnet is showing a strong resurgence with a total of approximately 130,000 unique bots spread across 179 countries since November 2021,” researchers from Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs said in a report.
Emotet, prior to its takedown in late January 2021 as part of a coordinated law enforcement operation dubbed “Ladybird,” had infected no fewer than 1.6 million devices globally, acting as a conduit for cybercriminals to install other types of malware, such as banking trojans or ransomware, onto compromised systems.
The malware officially resurfaced in November 2021 using TrickBot as a delivery vehicle, with the latter shuttering its attack infrastructure late last month after several key members of the group were absorbed into the Conti ransomware cartel. Read more:https://bit.ly/3vXV6tW