Banking malware targeting German speakers

HeungSoo Kang of Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center wrote that a new variant of a powerful type of malware that steals online banking credentials has been found targeting mostly German speakers.

The malware, called Emotet, was spotted around last June by security vendors. The new variant, called Trojan:Win32/Emotet.C, is being spread by spam emails. It comes in the form of a link to a website hosting the malware or a PDF document icon that is actually the malware.

The spam messages try to gain the attention of potential victims by purporting to be some sort of claim, a phone bill, an invoice from a bank or a message from PayPal.

The malware will pull credentials from a variety of email programs including Microsoft’s Outlook, Mozilla’s Thunderbird and instant messaging programs such as Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

Kang wrote: The stolen information is sent back to Emotet’s “command and control (C&C) server where it is used by other components to send spam emails to spread the threat.”