13/03/2023
10:59

2023W11 Weekly report => 13/03 2K23 - 19/03 2K23 MalSpam campaigns  targeting Italy


Malware spread through the campaigns: AgentTesla, Emotet, FormBook, LokiBot, Mekotio, QakBot, Remcos e Ursnif
       
week11

Weekly report by TG Soft's C.R.A.M concerning Italian malspam campaigns.

Below  the details of the campaigns massively spread during the week from March 13 to March 19, 2023.


In the monitored week, global campaigns decreased slightly (2 units) from the previous week, with those targeting Italian users decreasing by only 1 unit.


The week was characterized by Password Stealers of the Families: AgentTesla, FormBook, LokiBot, Mekotio, QakBot, Remcos and Ursnif.

Massive MalSpam distribution of Emotet malware continued during the week. Emotet resumed MalSpam operations the previous week after a hiatus of about 4 months. The full disclosure is available at the link: Emotet is back!

The blue bar indicates the total number of campaigns monitored in Italy in each week, while the red bar concerns campaigns written in Italian (targeting Italy).

We monitored 78 campaigns this week, 27 of which used Italian as their language.



In order to understand how the various weeks are divided, below is a small table showing the breakdown of the periods considered:

Week
from to
Week_08 20/02 26/02
Week_09 27/02 05/03
Week_10 06/03 12/03
Week_11 13/03 19/03


During the week the highest peak of campaigns was found on Thursday, March 16 with 24 different campaigns. On the same day the peak was found for the Italy target with 9 campaigns, as is evidenced by the chart below:




In the following chart we see the malware families that were spread globally for each day in the week:



Instead, in this graph we see the distribution based on malware family. In the past week, 11 different families were detected:


The majority of the executable samples featured this week are MSILs (C#) covering 26.93% of the malware sent via e-mail. In second place are Win32s with 20.51%.
35.90% of the samples are Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, etc.).


In the picture below we can see the various types of languages used in malware development:


In the following graph we see the distribution of the various types of languages divided by day:

 

In this graph we can see the malware families that were spread with target Italy (written in Italian) in the week:

 
The Italian campaigns analyzed by TG Soft's C.R.A.M. were grouped according to macro categories, obtained from the subject of the email message exploited for malware distribution (malspam). Below we see the subjects used in the various campaigns divided by day and type of malware.
 
13/03/2023
AgentTesla - spread through a campaign themed "Orders".

14/03/2023
Emotet - spread through three  campaigns themed "Various / Reply-Chain".
Remcos - spread through a campaign themed "Various".
Ursnif - spread through a campaign themed "Revenue Agency".

15/03
/2023
Emotet - spread through two campaigns themed "Various / Reply-Chain".
QakBot - spread through a campaign themed "Invoices".
Ursnif - spread through a campaign themed "Revenue Agency".

16/03/2023
Emotet - spread through six  campaigns themed "Various / Reply-Chain".
Mekotio - spread through a campaign themed "Invoices".
LokiBot - spread through a campaign themed "Orders"..
Ursnif - spread through a campaign themed "GLS Courier".

17/03/2023
Emotet - spread through six  campaigns themed "Various / Reply-Chain".

18/03/2023
Emotet - spread through a campaign themed "Various / Reply-Chain".

19/03/2023
FormBook - spread through a campaign themed "Payments".



EMOTET
The massive sending of MalSpam emails to spread the Emotet malware continued in the week just passed. The full information on the analysis of new MalSpam campaigns to spread Emotet is available at the link: Emotet is back!
Malspam emails contain either a Word attachment or a OneNote attachment (extension .one). Emotet for the first time, is also using OneNote documents - which are generally less widely used - to attempt to evade security systems. The use of OneNote documents has been seen before by other malware such as QakBot. More than 1,000 univocal hashes of OneNote files used by Emotet were monitored during the week. Below we see the number of campaigns monitored on different days of the week:


 
In the next graph we see the number of Malspam emails from Emotet analyzed on different days of the week, for a total that is almost 1 Million analyzed emails:

 
Find out if you are an Emotet target!
TG Soft, as reported in the informative "HAVEiBeenEMOTET portal to find out whether a mailbox has been used in malspam campaigns to spread EMOTET " has provided and maintained for over a year the HAVEiBeenEMOTET service, which is useful to check if your email addresses or domains are targeted by Emotet.
With this service you can check for free if your email addresses/domains are involved or are targets of MalSpam by Emotet.
Advanced search features and the IOC feed are available by registering and activating the API service at the link: 
HAVEiBeenEMOTET - API


 

Check out the campaigns for the month of February/March

 We invite you to check out the February and March 2023 reports to stay up-to-date on the malspam campaigns circulating in Italy:

06/03/2023 => Weekly report of Italian MalSpam campaigns from March 06, 2023 to March 12, 2023
27/02/2023 => Weekly report of Italian MalSpam campaigns from February 27, 2023 to March 05, 2023
20/02/2023 => Weekly report of Italian MalSpam campaigns from February 20, 2023 to February 26, 2023
13/02/2023 => Weekly report of Italian Malspam campaigns from February 13, 2023 to February 19, 2023


C.R.A.M. 
TG Soft's Anti-Malware Research Center
Any information published on our site may be used and published on other websites, blogs, forums, facebook and/or in any other form both in paper and electronic form as long as the source is always and in any case cited explicitly “Source: CRAM by TG Soft www.tgsoft.it” with a clickable link to the original information and / or web page from which textual content, ideas and / or images have been extrapolated.
It will be appreciated in case of use of the information of C.R.A.M. by TG Soft www.tgsoft.it in the report of summary articles the following acknowledgment/thanks “Thanks to Anti-Malware Research Center C.R.A.M. by TG Soft of which we point out the direct link to the original information: [direct clickable link]”

Vir.IT eXplorer PRO is certified by the biggest international organisation: