Emotet is one of the most widely distributed malware families over the past few years. Emotet (also known as Geodo) initially started as a banking trojan written for the purpose of perpetrating fraud. It is usually distributed through large-scale email spam campaigns containing malicious attachments or using embedded links to malicious documents containing a downloader script.

The Emotet botnet was disrupted by global law enforcement action on January 27, 2021 during which several arrests were made. This action took the botnet offline for almost a year before it resurfaced on November 15, 2021.