By Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin.

Coronavirus is dominating the news and threat actors are taking advantage.
Cisco Talos has found multiple malware families being distributed with Coronavirus lures and themes. This includes emotet and several RAT variants.

Executive Summary

Using the news to try and increase clicks and drive traffic is nothing new for malicious actors. We commonly see actors leveraging current news stories or events to try and increase the likelihood of infection. The biggest news currently is focused on the new virus affecting the world, with a focus on China: the coronavirus. There are countless news articles and email-based marketing campaigns going at full throttle right now, as such, we wanted to take a deeper look at how this is manifesting itself on the threat landscape.

Our investigation had several phases, first looking at the email based campaigns then pivoting into open-source intelligence sources for additional samples. These investigations uncovered a series of campaigns from the adversaries behind Emotet, along with a series of other commodity malware families using these same topics as lures, and a couple of odd documents and applications along the way. What was also striking was the amount of legitimate emails containing things like Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets related to the coronavirus. This really underscores why using these as lures is so attractive to adversaries and why organizations and individuals need to be vigilant when opening mail attachments, regardless of its origins.