US Military Gets Under Threat From Crypto Ransomware Malware

The US military I snow under threat according to cyber-security researchers who are warning that a powerful email ransomware malware is targeting their systems. The Emotet malware is used as an attack vector which allows Trickbots and ransomware attacks as we are reading further in the crypto news today.

Last year in December we saw that the Emotet malware was the biggest threat and it seems that it remains that way since its main attack vector is through spam email campaigns that have malicious links or Microsoft Word document in it. By clicking the link or simply opening the document will download the malware to the computer and at this point, the malware will propagate itself by harvesting the email contacts and continuing the spam cycle. It can also analyze the regular contracts and respond to ongoing email threads which make it harder to recognize as a threat.

Over the past few months, Emotet managed to successfully compromise a few targets in the US government and this led to an increase in infected emails that target the addresses with .gov and .mil which are the top-level domains in 2019. After the brief break for the Orthodox Christmas, the trend continued throughout the month. The malware can also mimic the email language and as an example, an email was sent targeting a staff member to the US Senator Cory Booker. This email contained signatures indicating that it originated from someone else that uses booker.senate.gov tag.

The US Military got this kind of malware since Emotet is financially motivated according to the researcher Cisco Talos, ick Biasini. There are a lot of examples of Emotet being an initial infection vector that can be seen but then you can see a Trickbot is dropped and that’s followed by the ransomware. If you have seen there is a lot of this huge malware that can do a lot of harm and Emotet plays a huge role as well. The ransomware aims to access the encrypted systems’ data with operators demanding payment in crypto or bitcoin for the decryption key.

The other malware in Check Point Research that was noted in the report for 2019 is the XMRig. This was an open-source software for hijacking the CPU resources for mining Monero and in many ways is really impressive that this malware rates highly.