Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 177dfc7deb071d62…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

56.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-03-28
MD5: 3f6d7456f8d91f0a1fb53ad76c1bbc43 SHA-1: d5360a8033556a572e13cce34bd5a32377e0f88a SHA-256: 177dfc7deb071d629d813d9451268310cff9c66ed3595a1cd61b0ea79a73d273
262 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1204.002 Malicious File

The file is an Excel 4.0 macro-enabled workbook that contains an Auto_Open macro. This macro is designed to download and execute a payload from one of the six embedded URLs. The ClamAV detection and the presence of XLM macros with dangerous functions strongly indicate this is a downloader, likely Emotet, attempting to fetch a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 6

  • 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.
  • XLM Auto_Open with dangerous formula APIs critical OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet contains an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry and dangerous XLM formula APIs that can invoke programs, write files, or transfer control without VBA.
  • URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (6 URLs) critical OLE_XLM_CELL_ARRAY_URL
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet stages its payload URL across the BIFF8 Shared String Table (one quoted-char SST entry concatenated with & at runtime) or across individual numeric cells (one ASCII charcode per cell). 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 BIFF8 record stream and decoding SST entries plus LABELSST/RK/NUMBER cells.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Emotet03220-9942564-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Emotet03220-9942564-0
  • 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.
  • 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://church.ktc-center.net/PbSkdCOW/
    • https://chobemaster.com/components/gus/
    • https://christianchapman.com/cgi-bin/gADHL9UXSFUTN/
    • http://chmiola.net/audio/6OuzyjPS/
    • http://clanfog.co.uk/_vti_bin/aObJD8vpKaJRLKgoX6i/
    • https://cipes.gob.mx/css/A046XJg/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
5834970f734bf661b309120f05c0862d1e7420175d65222097e2d0e18d98d2e0		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 6614 bytes

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