Emotet — Office (OLE) / .DOCX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 0dddfc149150477c…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .DOCX

155.6 KB Created: 2021-01-04 18:59:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: ed97b662ff4928f0545a9e3bba62079a SHA-1: 20f94f74ec48df10b90d99fa764503ecc55f31a1 SHA-256: 0dddfc149150477c5fae49dec6477c7936aaab52d827e85d522a6aca5217fcda
270 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer T1036 Masquerading

The sample contains a VBA macro that executes upon opening the document, as indicated by the Document_Open heuristic. This macro utilizes CreateObject to instantiate the Scripting.FileSystemObject, which is then used to create multiple files on the filesystem with obfuscated names and content. The ClamAV detection and the heuristic firings strongly suggest this is an Emotet variant designed to download and execute further malicious payloads.

Heuristics 8

  • Dangerous API name reassembled from split string literals critical OLE_VBA_SPLIT_KEYWORD_OBFUSCATION
    VBA concatenates short string literals that reassemble a dangerous API/ProgID/LOLBin name (e.g. Scripting.FileSystemObject, WScript.Shell, powershell, URLDownloadToFile) which appears in no single literal. Splitting an API name across string concatenation is done only to evade keyword scanning.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02224-9938637-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02224-9938637-0
  • Document_Open macro high OLE_VBA_DOCOPEN
    Document_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
  • Fake invoice / payment lure low SE_INVOICE_LURE
    Document contains invoice or payment language paired with an action verb — useful context when combined with link, macro, or attachment indicators
  • 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 http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
28e0aab9def1820176582f12126397a14f2c858209766b704c735ce1d1db4cc2		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 7154 bytes

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