Emotet malware wants to invite you to a Halloween party

To take advantage of the trick-or-treating festivities, the Emotet malware gang is sending out spam emails that invite you to a Halloween party.

Emotet is a malware infection that spreads through emails containing Word documents containing malicious macros. Once these documents are opened, they will try to trick the user into enabling macros that download the Emotet malware onto the computer.

Once the malware is installed, Emotet will use the computer to send spam emails and ultimately install other malware that could lead to a ransomware attack on the victim's network.

Emotet is playing a Halloween trick

The Emotet malware gang has created an email that pretends to invite you to a Halloween party to trick you into opening the malicious attachment.

While the email subjects and text of the Halloween-themed emails vary, the general idea is that you are being invited to a Halloween party, with all the details in the attached malicious document.

An example of the text found in one of these emails is:

Dear, 

If you are coming it would be good!

Details in the attachment.

According to FireEye's Alex Lanstein, the different names used for the malicious Word attachments in the 2020 Halloween Emotet campaign include:

Inviting friends to your Halloween Extravaganza.doc
Halloween.doc
Halloween party invitation.doc
Halloween Pot Luck 10.31.doc
Halloween party.doc

If a user opens the attachment, they will be greeted with the standard "Enable Editing" and "Enable Content" button, that when clicked, will install the Emotet Trojan on the computer.  So, make sure not to click it!

Like last year, Emotet did not bother updating their template to use a Halloween orange and black color theme or make it festive by including an image of a pumpkin.

Instead, Emotet is sticking with their document template that asks users to upgrade their installed Microsoft Word version.

If you receive an email with an invite to a Halloween party and it tells you to open an attachment, do not open it. Instead, eat some candy as a treat for not falling for their trick.