* Emotet resumed spamming operations on March 7, 2023, after a months-long hiatus. * Initially leveraging heavily padded Microsoft Word documents to attempt to evade sandbox analysis and endpoint protection, the botnets switched to distributing malicious OneNote documents on March 16. * Since returning, Emotet has leveraged several distinct infection chains, indicating that they are modifying their approach based on their perceived success in infecting new systems. * The initial emails delivered to victims are consistent with what has been observed from Emotet over the past several years.

Recently (On March 18 2023 at 23:44), a new malspam campaign has been observed in the wild ( HERE ), which caused a significant amount of concern. This campaign is designed to distribute malicious emails, which contain a harmful payload that can infect a user’s system, steal sensitive information, or launch other types of attacks.

* Initially observed in July 2016, TrickGate is a shellcode-based packer offered as a service to hide malware from EDRs and antivirus programs. * Over the last 6 years, TrickGate was used to deploy the top members of the “Most Wanted Malware” list, such as Cerber, Trickbot, Maze, Emotet, REvil, Cobalt Strike, AZORult, Formbook, AgentTesla and more. * TrickGate managed to stay under the radar for years because it is transformative – it undergoes changes periodically. This characteristic caused the research community to identify it by numerous attributes and names. * While the packer’s wrapper changed over time, the main building blocks within TrickGate shellcode are still in use today. * Check Point Threat Emulation successfully detects and blocks the TrickGate packer.