Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 17af408bdd62e540…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

109.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: d22f3943278d6b0ae53c230781897dee SHA-1: 9d2e9e0caf93ba211b16749cc9535a86134ab85f SHA-256: 17af408bdd62e540e6797639e1d71716bf0642341297b5338fa9193d762fa844
142 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The sample contains Excel 4.0 macros, identified by the OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN heuristic. These macros reconstruct and attempt to download payloads from multiple URLs, including 'http://arzulens.com/wp-includes/7gySgTg/'. The ClamAV detection name 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02220-9938626-0' strongly suggests the Emotet family. The macro's functionality points to a downloader, likely delivered via spearphishing.

Heuristics 4

  • URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (5 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.EmotetExcel02220-9938626-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02220-9938626-0
  • 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://arzulens.com/wp-includes/7gySgTg/
    • https://simplinteriors.com/wp-admin/B1e/
    • https://www.swaong.com/wp-admin/k9Db4Vjafnk/
    • http://68bets.site/b/bL2bq71qNY/
    • https://farocf.com/wp-admin/rX9FcCxf0Cf4bj/