Malicious Office (OOXML) — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 13ce9aa066a13b94…

MALICIOUS

Office (OOXML)

746.5 KB Created: 2020-05-11 14:19:29 UTC Authoring application: Microsoft Excel 15.0300 First seen: 2020-12-25
MD5: 6ece70b1eaeab25726ae72a01a7b3fb1 SHA-1: 9d018a67e84ba41d4b807aba38b88ee3d87bb14f SHA-256: 13ce9aa066a13b949b83198950e1b4e8923fecd0c3f829d3219b5f891edc76b7
182 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer T1204.002 Malicious File

This Excel file contains Excel 4.0 macros, which are known to be used for malicious purposes. The macros contain strings indicative of downloading and executing a file, specifically referencing WinAPI functions like URLDownloadToFileA and ShellExecuteA. The embedded URL http://auroom24.ru/21.gif is likely used to fetch a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 4

  • Excel 4.0 macro sheet (1 sheet(s)) critical 2 related findings OOXML_XLM_MACROSHEET
    Spreadsheet contains an Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro sheet — XLM was a major Office malware vector during 2020-2022 and evaded many VBA-focused controls before Microsoft tightened XLM defaults. Even legitimate XLM use is rare in modern workbooks. The macro sheet is stored as XLSB/BIFF12 binary content, which many XML-only OOXML scanners miss.
  • Binary XLM macro sheet with WinAPI/download strings critical OOXML_XLM_BINARY_WINAPI_STRINGS
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet is stored as BIFF12/XLSB binary data and contains Win32 download or process-execution API strings such as URLDownloadToFileA, ShellExecuteA, or CreateDirectoryA. These strings are high-signal in XLM macro sheets and catch payload-download macros that XML-formula scanners cannot parse.
  • URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (1 URL) critical OOXML_XLM_CELL_ARRAY_URL
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet stages its payload URL across individual numeric cells (one ASCII charcode per cell), inside an embedded HTA that uses VBScript Chr()/&-concat obfuscation, or split across multi-char fragment cells a download formula concatenates by reference (=A1&A2&… / CONCATENATE(...)). 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 BIFF12 record stream of every worksheet and macrosheet part and decoding RK/inline-string/shared-string cells in row-major and column-major order plus FORMULA cell-reference concatenation in token order.
  • 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://auroom24.ru/21.gif Referenced by macro

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_sheet_00.bin xlm-macrosheet OOXML XLM macro sheet: xl/macrosheets/sheet1.bin 53822 bytes
SHA-256: a60ab4ef5678ff5bf137998cafdc5b627b87b39a41b9a6aad21726dfc25c44e3
Preview script
First 1,000 lines of the extracted script
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