Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 00fa891ad819e526…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

144.0 KB Created: 2006-09-28 05:33:49 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: eb8f407b693cc3875ab04a091ee843bf SHA-1: 85ec476af1c3e9689c6361cdd362e6db278d2407 SHA-256: 00fa891ad819e5264bcfff40583ebf26026abbe454973534124445563b4928e6
300 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1204.002 Malicious File T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The critical heuristic 'OLE_VBA_OBFUSCATED_AUTOEXEC_LOADER' indicates an obfuscated auto-exec loader. The Workbook_Open macro is present and attempts to execute code via CreateObject and Shell. The script attempts to download a payload from multiple URLs, including the reconstructed URL 'http://althyplane.com/wp-admin/ELW8YcOqJn/', and saves it as 'c:\programdata\cbjwektde.bat' before execution.

Heuristics 7

  • Obfuscated auto-exec VBA loader critical OLE_VBA_OBFUSCATED_AUTOEXEC_LOADER
    Auto-exec VBA reconstructs strings with a heavy custom decoder (numeric char-array, repeated hex-string decode, or junk-token Replace removal) and feeds them to a COM-instantiation or execution sink. This obfuscated-loader shape keeps CreateObject/Shell/URL indicators out of the macro source.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • Reference to Windows Script Host high SC_STR_WSCRIPT
    Reference to Windows Script Host
  • Workbook_Open macro high OLE_VBA_WBOPEN
    Workbook_Open macro
  • CreateObject call high OLE_VBA_CREATEOBJ
    CreateObject call
  • VBA p-code auto-exec with execution tokens high OLE_VBA_PCODE_AUTOEXEC_EXEC
    Compiled VBA/cache stream contains an auto-execution token together with shell/download/object-execution tokens. This catches p-code-only or source-extraction-failure macro documents where visible source is unavailable.
  • VBA macros detected medium OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains VBA macro code

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
022b6ea87e671715cd07f596eceb5d45e85534a367868a0e820c8aa5cb013822
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 6734 bytes