Emotet — Office (OLE) malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 13c1ba72706bb674…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE)

158.7 KB Created: 2020-09-15 13:42:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 41a765549126df38427b01e8cb894ab5 SHA-1: f5e8f353c39c3539312327f85db9a764d8451a4b SHA-256: 13c1ba72706bb674ea0a6bf5b7231040f81d44e0ef91cabe81d84556525dc258
262 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1059.005 Visual Basic

The sample is a malicious Office document containing obfuscated VBA macros. A critical heuristic indicates the presence of an obfuscated PowerShell stager within a UserForm, likely intended to download and execute a second-stage payload. The Document_Open macro and CreateObject calls further support this, and the ClamAV detection explicitly names Emotet. The reconstructed PowerShell command is: powershell

Heuristics 7

  • Hidden UserForm PowerShell EncodedCommand stager critical OLE_USERFORM_OBFUSCATED_POWERSHELL
    OLE document contains a UTF-16LE form/property string with an obfuscated PowerShell -EncodedCommand payload. The observed macro family reconstructs this hidden string with Split/Join or UserForm property reads and launches it through WMI/COM process creation. This is downloader malware, not an Office CVE exploit.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Malware.Emotet-9762371-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Malware.Emotet-9762371-0
  • 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
  • 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
8bee8f90d9dfb3891c7c232e7baf01a2aaa2db95a501fe4ff2d320babae29389
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 22935 bytes