Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 16b5933de39cb05b…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

134.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 96a280da3d7c763087fddbce7689ccb7 SHA-1: 990ce5dc578b0fbc8da732d313d496bfcc341ad2 SHA-256: 16b5933de39cb05bc5a6143d4e3a785c7eae3ca0ed8c591b8b0559964ea3fc01
302 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The file contains a Workbook_Open VBA macro that utilizes CreateObject to execute a Windows Script Host command. This macro is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from a list of obfuscated URLs. The presence of Emotet-related heuristics and the specific ClamAV signature strongly indicate this family. The reconstructed URL from the document body, 'http://mytelefonist.de/wp-content/bLm8fxV2M/', is a key indicator of the download mechanism.

Heuristics 8

  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (11 URLs) critical OLE_VBA_CELL_DROPPER_URL
    VBA reads worksheet cells, strips junk substrings via Replace(), and base64/UTF-16 decodes the result into a PowerShell EncodedCommand payload. The download URL is never contiguous in the file bytes; it was recovered by removing the macro's Replace() junk tokens from the cell strings and decoding the staged base64.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • Reference to Windows Script Host high SC_STR_WSCRIPT
    Reference to Windows Script Host
  • Workbook_Open macro high OLE_VBA_WBOPEN
    Workbook_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://sesco-ks.com/wp-content/DJkMVMU6cBr45/
    • https://sangwin.in/magnisapiente/UzYqb1lvgq/
    • http://actividades.laforetlanguages.com/wp-admin/OfFq/
    • http://sbcopylive.com.br/wp-admin/hvAXqZc4DyKBzDZO/
    • http://sep.dfwsolar.club/hzh3v/poAgyopszuh6a1EIG/
    • http://b-lubisi-motivational-speaker.com/wp-admin/Wf5rQabNRai/
    • http://mytelefonist.de/wp-content/bLm8fxV2M/
    • https://www.yeald.finance/wp-content/uploads/jqAorV83quhL23HMg/
    • http://tattooblog.cn/wp-includes/7AvyW/
    • http://docs-construction.com/wp-admin/jDDqg/
    • https://pmfstukm.com/wp-admin/SoenE35FXJBjVdnfME/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
d6216b1540c6d866e0cdc66ed3bfa2b79b477655c56d42a698e7b407351a97e3		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 6560 bytes

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