INFOGRAPHIC
global deployment of the Emotet ‘dropper’
banking malware, which had been seemingly
inactive the previous four months. There
were 61 significant campaigns identified,
marking a 145% increase over the last
quarter despite fewer emails being analysed
during the period.
Emotet was a key driver in this spike, as the
banking trojan/malware was a component in
almost every attack identified. This massive
increase in activity is highly likely to be an
indication of threat actors refocusing their
efforts from impersonation to exploiting the
current effectiveness of ransomware.
“It’s no surprise that threat actors are
using a combination of simplistic and
sophisticated attacks to gain access to
organisations. That’s also likely why we saw
such a huge spike in the recently dormant
Emotet campaign – they’re attempting to
gain as much attack space as possible to
land other sophisticated attacks or hold
organisations hostage,” said Josh Douglas,
Vice President of Threat Intelligence
at Mimecast. “These reports offer
organisations a global view on how threats
are evolving so they can make informed
decisions on how to best strengthen their
cyber-resilience posture.” •
conducted by threat actors globally.
However, given the holiday gift-giving
season from October to December, some of
this increase was to be expected.
The most prominent observation of this
quarter’s research was the widespread
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