The current Emotet malspam campaigns are conducted by “thread hijacking” techniques, where the attacker attaches a plain or zip protected file to the email thread.
The attack consists of XLS files with Excel 4.0 macro, the victim is then lured to move the file from a specific directory which will macro to bypass security controls and execute.
Another change was on the Emotet architecture which moved from 32bit to 64bit, where some new features were added, and some old code rewritten.
The final stage is a dynamic link library (DLL) that is decrypted and uploaded to memory during runtime, making investigation much more complex.
Not only it runs in memory, but calls such as the ones to VirtualAlloc are obfuscated, having the API retrieved dynamically at runtime.