#ThreatThursday - Emotet

On Friday, July 17, many of us woke up to a bunch of new phishing emails. What happened over night? Well, like Sherrod DeGrippo from ProofPoint ...

Jorge Orchilles

4 min. read 30 Jul 2020

On Friday, July 17, many of us woke up to a bunch of new phishing emails. What happened over night? Well, like Sherrod DeGrippo from ProofPoint wrote, emotet returns after a 5 month hiatus. Emotet is a banking trojan that gains access to end user machines and steals their financial information such as login information and personal identifiable information (PII). This week, we met with Sherrod and discussed Emotet. As usual, we create an adversary emulation plan based on Cyber Threat Intelligence and then emulate it with SCYTHE. We share the emulation plan so the community can also emulate the Emotet campaign to test and improve people, process, and technology. Lastly, we discuss how to defend against Emotet, in this case, we cover training the end users by performing phishing simulations. We hope you enjoy it.

Cyber Threat Intelligence

This week, our Cyber Threat Intelligence comes from a company that is at the forefront of email security, ProofPoint. We interview Sherrod DeGrippo who wrote the article emotet returns after a 5 month hiatus to understand what Emotet is, how they operate, and how we can improve security. Here is this week’s interview:

We found a number of additional resources related to the latest Emotet campaign to pull out the Cyber Threat Intelligence:

An excellent resource to see replays of what occurs when someone falls for the phishing email and opens the emotet document is the site any.run. Here are a few for emotet:

Emotet has been around for a number of years and is tracked by MITRE ATT&CK. We can see the TTPs via the ATT&CK Navigator Layer created from the JSON in the SCYTHE Community Github.

Adversary Emulation Plan

Emotet works by spamming targets with business-related emails containing malicious Office documents that are either attached to the email or with a link to download the malicious file. If someone falls for the phishing email, opens the document, and enables macros, the Emotet malware will execute.

As usual, below is the adversary emulation profile for Emotet. The emulation plan can be downloaded from the SCYTHE Community Threats Github and imported to your SCYTHE instance.

Tactic	Description
Description	Emotet is a modular malware variant which is primarily used as a downloader for other malware variants such as TrickBot and IcedID. Emotet first emerged in June 2014 and has been primarily used to target the banking sector.
Objective	Banking Trojan - steal banking information and PII
Initial Access	T1566 - Phishing T1566.001 - Spearphishing Attachment T1566.002 - Spearphishing Link
Command and Control	T1573 - Encrypted Channel T1573.002 - Asymmetric Cryptography T1571 - Non-Standard Port
Execution	T1059 - Command and Scripting Interpreter T1059.001 - PowerShell T1059.003 - Windows Command Shell T1059.005 - Visual Basic T1053 - Scheduled Task/Job T1053.005 - Scheduled Task T1204 - User Execution T1204.001 - Malicious Link T1204.002 - Malicious File T1047 - Windows Management Instrumentation
Defense Evasion	T1027 - Obfuscated Files or Information T1027.002 - Software Packing T1055 - Process Injection T1055.001 - Dynamic-link Library Injection T1078 - Valid Accounts T1078.003 - Local Accounts
Discovery	T1087 - Account Discovery T1087.003 - Email Account T1057 - Process Discovery
Credential Access	T1110 - Brute Force T1110.001 - Password Guessing T1555 - Credentials from Password Stores T1555.003 - Credentials from Web Browsers T1040 - Network Sniffing T1003 - OS Credential Dumping T1003.001 - LSASS Memory T1552 - Unsecured Credentials T1552.001 - Credentials In Files
Collection	T1560 - Archive Collected Data T1114 - Email Collection T1114.001 - Local Email Collection
Persistence	T1547 - Boot or Logon Autostart Execution T1547.001 - Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder T1543 - Create or Modify System Process T1543.003 - Windows Service
Lateral Movement	T1210 - Exploitation of Remote Services T1021 - Remote Services T1021.002 - SMB/Windows Admin Shares
Exfiltration	T1041 - Exfiltration Over C2 Channel

Defend against Emotet

Defending against emotet and other phishing campaigns can be broken up by people, process, and technology. ProofPoint is an excellent technology solution to cut down and stop phishing and malicious emails from getting to users.

From a people and process perspective, user awareness training is one of the best defenses against phishing attacks like emotet campaigns. Creating a phishing simulation program involves coordination with a number of internal teams but at a high level:

Create an email template that is used against the target organization
Create a unique link per email address
Send the emails to the target addresses
Metrics: Clicked email (failed test); Reported email (passed test)
If someone clicks on the email, they should get a message immediately informing them this was a test and with best practices of what to do next time
People reporting the phishing email should have some sort of positive reinforcement

Conclusion

Emotet campaigns are back and ProofPoint was quick to catch it. We had a chat with Sherrod DeGrippo from ProofPoint and discussed the new campaign, phishing as a whole, emulating emotet, and how to defend against it. We created an adversary emulation plan and shared it on our Github. Lastly, we covered how to defend against phishing attacks by focusing on people, process, and technology. We hope you enjoyed it.

This Threat Thursday post discusses active research by SCYTHE and other cited third parties into an ongoing threat. The information in this post should be considered preliminary and may be updated as research continues. This information is provided “as-is” without any warranty or condition of any kind, either express or implied.

About SCYTHE

SCYTHE provides an advanced attack emulation platform for the enterprise and cybersecurity consulting market. The SCYTHE platform enables Red, Blue, and Purple teams to build and emulate real-world adversarial campaigns in a matter of minutes. Customers are in turn enabled to validate the risk posture and exposure of their business and employees and the performance of enterprise security teams and existing security solutions. Based in Arlington, VA, the company is privately held and is funded by Gula Tech Adventures, Paladin Capital, Evolution Equity, and private industry investors. For more information email info@scythe.io, visit https://scythe.io, or follow on Twitter @scythe_io.

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