acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

ACM News

Emotet Botnet Harvested 4.3 Million eMail Addresses; FBI Using 'Have I Been Pwned' to Alert the Victims


View as: Print Mobile App Share:
Artist's representation of the Emotet botnet.

After two months of inactivity, the notorious Emotet botnet apparently is poised to start delivering malicious code again.

Credit: bankinfosecurity.com

The FBI has handed over 4.3 million email addresses that were harvested by the Emotet botnet to the Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) service to make it easier to alert those affected. 

HIPB, run by Australian security research Troy Hunt, is a widely trusted breach alert service that underpins Mozilla's Firefox own breach-alert notifications.

The FBI collected the email addresses from Emotet's servers, following a takedown in January. The Emotet malware botnet was taken down by law enforcement in the US, Canada and Europe, disrupting what Europol said was the world's most dangerous botnet that had been plaguing the internet since 2014. 

Emotet was responsible for distributing ransomware, banking trojans and other threats through phishing and malware-laden spam.

From ZDNet
View Full Article


 

No entries found

Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account