Quote:After a lull of nearly two months, the Emotet botnet has returned with updated payloads and a campaign that is hitting 100,000 targets per day.

Emotet started life as a banking trojan in 2014 and has continually evolved to become a full-service threat-delivery mechanism. It can install a collection of malware on victim machines, including information stealers, email harvesters, self-propagation mechanisms and ransomware. It was last seen in volume in October, targeting volunteers for the Democratic National Committee (DNC); and before that, it became active in July after a five-month hiatus, dropping the Trickbot trojan. Before that, in February, it was seen in a campaign that sent SMS messages purporting to be from victims’ banks.

“The Emotet botnet is one of the most prolific senders of malicious emails when it is active, but it regularly goes dormant for weeks or months at a time,” said Brad Haas, researcher at Cofense, in a Tuesday blog. “This year, one such hiatus lasted from February through mid-July, the longest break Cofense has seen in the last few years. Since then, they observed regular Emotet activity through the end of October, but nothing from that point until today.”

The botnet is also staying true to form in terms of payloads, researchers said. “In October the most common secondary payloads were TrickBot, Qakbot and ZLoader; today we observed TrickBot,” according to Haas.