For more than half a decade, the malware known as Emotet has menaced the internet, growing into one of the largest botnets in the world and targeting victims with data theft and crippling ransomware. Now a sprawling, global police investigation has culminated in Emotet's takedown and the arrest of multiple alleged members of the criminal conspiracy behind it.
Europol announced today that a worldwide coalition of law enforcement agencies across the US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Lithuania, and Ukraine had disrupted Emotet, what it called the "most dangerous malware in the world." The global effort, known as Operation Ladybird, coordinated with private security researchers to disrupt and take over Emotet's command-and-control infrastructure—located in more than 90 countries, according to Ukrainian police—while simultaneously arresting at least two of the cybercriminal crew's Ukrainian members.
A video of a raid released by Ukrainian law enforcement shows officers seizing computer equipment, cash, and rows of gold bars from alleged Emotet operators. Neither Ukrainian police nor Europol has named the arrested hackers or detailed their alleged role in the Emotet crew. A statement from Ukrainian authorities notes that "other members of an international hacker group who used the infrastructure of the Emotet bot network to conduct cyberattacks have also been identified. Measures are being taken to detain them."
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"The Emotet infrastructure essentially acted as a primary door opener for computer systems on a global scale," reads a Europol statement about the operation. The international investigation and disruption operation, the statement reads, "resulted in this week’s action whereby law enforcement and judicial authorities gained control of the infrastructure and took it down from the inside."
According to the Dutch police ..
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