Email cyberthreats grow 37%. Spam campaigns with Emotet among the biggest “culprits” – Internet

New data from ESET reveals that over the first four months of the year, threats arriving via email grew 37%.

Experts indicate that, despite active phishing activities, this growth is largely due to Spam campaigns with malicious documents from the Emotet trojan family.

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Em March of this year saw a spike in Emotet’s large-scale spam campaignsbeing detected as variants of DOC/TrojanDownloader.Agent, in an increase that was also felt in Portugal.

Compared to the third quarter of 2021, experts found an 829% increase in the incidence of DOC/TrojanDownloader.Agent. Among the most affected countries are Japan, Italy and Spain.

This type of malware is distributed via malicious Microsoft Word documentswhich are capable of downloading other types of malware from the Internet.

However, it should be noted that the greater incidence of this campaign predated Microsoft’s disabling of Visual Basics for Applications macros that were downloaded by default in Office programs.

It is for this reason that the prevalence of malicious attachments with Office files used to spread this malware from the Emotet family is expected to decrease in the future.

O MSIL/TrojanDownloader.Agent was another of the threats that grew substantially during the period under review, increasing 130% compared to the third quarter of 2021.

According to researchers, this malicious software attempts to download other types of malware, usually containing a URL or a list of URLs that lead to its final malicious payload.

According to ESET, the MSIL/TrojanDownloader.Agent was the third biggest threat detected in Portugal during the first months of the year.

The data also indicates that 55% of the malicious attachments detected during the period under analysis were Windows executable attachments. Script files (30%) and Office documents (10%) follow.

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