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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 099149ded612fca1…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

272.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: df53dcb4770af7838fca1f45ed8f108e SHA-1: 8fcb365735c5b993554acceeb1ac3b6f096cd5bd SHA-256: 099149ded612fca1f46c8b31cdeb77543c51025bd82585ed6faf119affee11bf
180 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1059.005 Visual Basic T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The sample is an Excel 97-2003 Workbook containing Excel 4.0 macros, which is a strong indicator of malicious intent. The document body and heuristics indicate a lure to impersonate DocuSign and trick the user into enabling macros. The presence of the URLDownloadToFileA API call and the extracted URL suggest the macro is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload, likely named 'nkfkdsn.exe'.

Heuristics 5

  • Reference to URLDownloadToFile API critical SC_STR_URLDOWNLOAD
    Reference to URLDownloadToFile API
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings
  • Document signing service impersonation lure medium SE_DOCUSIGN_LURE
    Document impersonates DocuSign, Adobe Sign, or a similar signing service in a signing-request context

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
d33eb6c8974f3fadc0d24b070cfaac148934097838128fa136473cb6f16899c1
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 1187 bytes