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Cybercrime campaigns can last days or months, but the malicious actors behind them can be active for years.
As it’s often difficult to have first-hand information about the evolution of specific gangs (e.g., changes in membership and leadership, or motivations behind actions), the threat intelligence community generally resorts to tracking the most observable aspects of these criminal enterprises: the malware that is delivered to the victims and the infrastructure that is used to control compromised systems and collect sensitive information.
Malware campaigns are almost always trans-national in terms of both targets and infrastructure, covering multiple countries and sometimes spanning multiple continents. Therefore, it’s difficult to carry out coordinated law enforcement efforts (especially given that many law enforcement agencies are already stretched thin), and the defenses against these threats are primarily localized to specific countries or organizations.
However, sometimes the cyber threats are so egregious that they trigger the attention of a large group of people, resulting in major takedown operations such as 2011’s “Operation Ghost Click” or the Microsoft-led takedown of the TrickBot infrastructure in October 2020.
It was one of these efforts, and a historical one in this case, that brought down Emotet at the end of January 2021 — a feat that many considered impossible.
“Operation Ladybird” saw the law enforcement agencies of multiple countries (including the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Lithuania) cooperate to eradicate the Emotet infrastructure (see Figure 1).
Emotet, introduced in 2014 as a banking Trojan, has been Continue reading
