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ESET released data from the second quarter of 2022 on the cyberthreat landscape in Portugal, revealing a special incidence of malicious downloaders in the national territory. ESET’s detections in Portugal reveal a growth in downloaders of more than 120% from quarter to quarter, contrasting with the global trend in this category, which was one of deceleration.
Downloaders aim to download other malware programs or components and execute them without the victim necessarily being aware of this. In Portugal, the dominant downloader in the second quarter was Emotet, corresponding to around 70% of all detections in this category. And although detections of the Emotet family have decreased by 31% globally, in Portugal, detections have grown by 473%.
Emotet initially emerged as a banking Trojan designed to steal user credentials, but later versions have given it a modular capability capable of infecting systems with malware. It is mostly distributed via mass email campaigns using apparently legitimate infected attachment distribution ways.
According to ESET’s telemetry, Emotet operators were especially active in the national territory during the month of July, with practically no activity detected in August or September. Originally spotted in 2014, Emotet continues to be a dominant force in the downloaders category.
Asked about the increase in this malware, the Director General of ESET in Portugal, Nuno Mendes, highlights the need to “continue to invest in effective detection technologies at endpoints to detect these downloaders, as well as cloud sandboxing technology to detect zero threats -day”.For more information about ESET detections in this and other categories of cyberthreats, see the Threat Report T2 2022
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