Emotet, World's Most Dangerous Malware, Wreaking Havoc Anew

Not long ago, there was a piece of malware spreading across the globe wreaking havoc on the computer systems of governments, major companies, hospitals, and everyday users, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported.

Photo Insert: A diagram of how the virus works

Emotet would infect your computer by arriving as an email that looked legitimate. Once on your computer, it could do any number of malicious things, such as finding out your online banking password or encrypting all your files, and demanding money to get them back.

It would then often go on to read your address book and start sending out bogus emails that seem to come from you, spreading the infection to even more computers.

But in January of this year, authorities gave the all-clear. Europol, the EU's police service, announced that the infrastructure of the "world's most dangerous malware" - used mainly by organized crime groups - had been brought under control.

Investigators from eight countries were involved in the operation, which lasted more than two years. Indeed, no further Emotet incidents became known afterward.

Then on Sunday evening, Nov. 14, 2021, the systems of one team of security analysts registered a malware called TrickBot, which in turn loaded another malware. This was confirmed to be Emotet.

Experts from other security companies also confirmed the analysis of IT security company G Data. Almost a year after the major attack from the extremely dangerous malware was declared over, the security experts are now warning that Emotet is back.

"Smells like Emotet, looks like Emotet, behaves like Emotet - seems to be Emotet," is the conclusion of cybersecurity experts from G Data in a November 15 report called "Guess Who's Back?"

The German company had been supporting authorities with technical analyses. Security experts first became aware of Emotet in 2014 when it first infected systems around the world as a trojan.

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