Emotet is recognized by Europol as the most dangerous pest in the world. The number of hacked users has more than tripled from 2,843 in February 2022 to 9,086 in March, and the number of hacking attempts has more than tripled from 16,897 in February to 48,597 in March.

Emotet is both a controlled network of infected devices used to attack other devices, and malware that can extract various types of data, including financial data, from infected devices. Emotet was shut down in early 2021 by the joint efforts of law enforcement from different countries, but at the end of last year, the botnet was revived.

Emotet often infects devices via spam emails containing malicious Microsoft Office macros embedded. This macro lets you run a malicious PowerShell command followed by a command and control server and a bootloader that loads messages and runs such malicious modules. They can perform many different actions on an infected device.

The current version of Emotet can generate automated spam emails that keep spreading through infected devices, collect email addresses and emails from Thunderbird and Outlook, as well as passwords from popular browsers.