Malicious Office (OLE) / .XLS — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 18ffcbc58255c174…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

367.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: b894df117ad5256bdb502b58f9e2982f SHA-1: ad9d819bc5b66bc02c3e1a382c2849483cb7fd6d SHA-256: 18ffcbc58255c174b8331d1d6849ad4a0559c2279d56bf7b3c5d166dbfb38f6f
102 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1059.005 Visual Basic T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample is an Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro-enabled spreadsheet. It contains an Auto_Open macro that is designed to execute when the document is opened. The macro attempts to download a payload from one of two embedded URLs. The presence of an 'enable lure' heuristic indicates the document likely prompts the user to enable macros, a common social engineering tactic.

Heuristics 4

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings
  • 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 https://mayread.com/aXfFF8qdsV/th.html
    • https://tpcsv.neosj.why3s.tw/XjHoDakG/th.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
7758cbebef832a37ce0a327fd7d893202195f03ba9b854edef74b19dbb11678f
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8349 bytes