Emotet malware being presented to people this Christmas, through Greta Thunberg themed Phishing emails

A global spam email scheme has been discovered which is using Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg themed emails to lure users.

Spam consists of a single message that attempts to deliver the well-known malware Emotet. 

Emotet was discovered back in 2014 as a banking Trojan aimed at stealing financial data. It has now  gone through several iterations and has emerged as one of the most destructive malware aimed at the financial domain.

A recent research discovered this widespread campaign using Greta Thunberg’s name to lure users into downloading Emotet malware.

The email consists of the subject line “Support Greta Thunberg” which invites the recipient to join the protest against the government raising concern against the threat of climate change.

Details regarding the fake protest are included in a file attached to the email. When opened, the file will install Emotet malware onto the recipient’s device.

Users should be able to view the malware file in the outdated .doc format for Microsoft Word. The email itself contains multiple spelling and grammatical errors, something anyone would not anticipate from the newly crowned Time Person of the Year 2019.

This campaign is targeting people around the globe with the most targeted victims in Japan, Germany, Italy, UAE, Australia, and the UK. Recipients are also told to forward and promote the malicious email to their good wishers, meaning the campaign has rapidly spread across the world.

This malicious campaign suggests that attackers don’t hesitate to use the face of even famous entities with good intentions. They tend to exploit the factor of public awareness and interest cleverly.

Better to be prepared for such attacks before hand. Train your organizations, friends, family because humans are the last line of defence after a phish bypasses the other technologies. Checkout our Phishing simulation and training solution PhishGrid.

To know more about How to identify a phishing email, read some useful insight here.