Law Enforcement Hacks Emotet and Netwalker

The cops are fighting a game of whack-a-mole with the hackers and likely always will, but this week they whacked hard and had a couple of wins.

In a multi-nation effort including the US, UK, Europol and many others, the good guys (and ladies) took control of the command and control servers for the Emotet malware. Emotet is a huge player in the spam/malware game and this coordinated takedown will set them back a bunch. They had been working on this takedown for three years.

This doesn’t mean that they won’t be back, but it does mean that they will need to basically start over, conning people to click on the wrong links and compromising those computers again. Credit: Homeland Security Today

At the same time, law enforcement from the US and Bulgaria disrupted the Netwalker ransomware gangs by taking down their servers and indicting a Canadian who reportedly made over $25 million using the Netwalker tools. Credit: Metacurity

While this hits are great and high profile, and will definitely have at least a short term affect, there is too much money being made to have the hackers just quit. I don’t think it will deter many hackers, unfortunately.

As long as users and companies don’t treat the threat seriously enough, the hackers will just come back. After all, to paraphrase an old politician – hack a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there and after a while, it adds up to real money.

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