Malicious Office (OLE) / .XLSX — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 035ee884f0091233…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

357.0 KB Created: 2020-11-28 13:42:19 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: f623477eec15e20ba379032335f46743 SHA-1: cb1fb0eb992bf2c28632832c3ebce2b2476b1941 SHA-256: 035ee884f0091233230892c2f8a1b13e2aeea96b8068ce7e81cffdb316a423d2
202 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample contains Excel 4.0 macros with an Auto_Open entry, indicating automatic execution upon opening. The macros reconstruct and execute a command to download a second-stage payload from 'https://thephotographersworkflow.com/vv/popi.exe' using PowerShell. This indicates a downloader or droppper functionality.

Heuristics 5

  • 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.
  • XLM Auto_Open with dangerous formula APIs critical OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet contains an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry and dangerous XLM formula APIs that can invoke programs, write files, or transfer control without VBA.
  • URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (1 URL) critical OLE_XLM_CELL_ARRAY_URL
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet stages its payload URL across the BIFF8 Shared String Table (one quoted-char SST entry concatenated with & at runtime) or across individual numeric cells (one ASCII charcode per cell). The reconstructed URL is invisible to literal-bytes URL extraction because it is never contiguous in the workbook stream. URLs were recovered by walking the BIFF8 record stream and decoding SST entries plus LABELSST/RK/NUMBER cells.
  • 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.
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL https://thephotographersworkflow.com/vv/popi.exe
    • https://thephotographersworkflow.com/vv/popi.exe�

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
9aa2841f0903c5b3a26eae55bd1eb0416844c25a84ba8ec846549d83ea36b138		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 2184 bytes

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