Europol’s announcement on their disruption of the “world’s most dangerous malware” Emotet is being rightly celebrated in cybersecurity quarters, with the variant wreaking havoc since it was first uncovered in 2014. Unfortunately, cybercriminals will not rest in developing other malicious variants to fill this vacuum.

Alan Grau, VP of IoT/Embedded Solutions at Sectigo, comments:

“The announcement that Europol has disrupted Emotet’s infrastructure is a very welcome development in the enterprise security landscape. For years, businesses have been relentlessly targeted by this malicious variant, initially infecting employees’ computers through corrupted email attachments before spreading laterally throughout the organizations network. 

The demise of Emotet will be welcomed in many quarters, but there is no doubt that malicious actors will be developing new variants to fill the vacuum. As such, email security practices, especially in light of remote work, are more important than ever.

These attacks are one of the most common and dangerous methods to infiltrate an organisation. The technique has so far caught businesses under-prepared, as protection solutions available are cumbersome and hard to implement at scale. To protect against these ongoing attacks, enterprises must continue to train users on how to avoid phishing attacks. It is also critical to implement strong email security. Zero-touch deployment S/MIME email certificates automatically update the security profile of the email communication by authenticating the sender, encrypting the email content and attachment, and ensuring integrity.”