Schneier - Emotat Malware Causes Physical Damage

Microsoft is reporting that an Emotat malware infection shut down a network by causing computers to overheat and then crash.

The Emotet payload was delivered and executed on the systems of Fabrikam -- a fake name Microsoft gave the victim in their case study -- five days after the employee's user credentials were exfiltrated to the attacker's command and control (C&C) server.

Before this, the threat actors used the stolen credentials to deliver phishing emails to other Fabrikam employees, as well as to their external contacts, with more and more systems getting infected and downloading additional malware payloads.

The malware further spread through the network without raising any red flags by stealing admin account credentials authenticating itself on new systems, later used as stepping stones to compromise other devices.

Within 8 days since that first booby-trapped attachment was opened, Fabrikam's entire network was brought to its knees despite the IT department's efforts, with PCs overheating, freezing, and rebooting because of blue screens, and Internet connections slowing down to a crawl because of Emotet devouring all the bandwidth.

The infection mechanism was one employee opening a malicious attachment to a phishing email. I can't find any information on what kind of attachment.

from Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/emotat_malware_.html