Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 191f0672fa507470…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

151.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 27bc87d29797facc4259b9f6436872ab SHA-1: 32825a5557defa92294367ad97bba0c11136cea2 SHA-256: 191f0672fa507470a757e8399a9feedc34a57142d00eac66077635bab7112a77
302 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The file contains VBA macros, including a Workbook_Open event, which is a common technique for Emotet. The macros reconstruct and execute a batch file from 'c:\programdata\jledshf.bat' and also attempt to download payloads from multiple URLs. The presence of CreateObject and Wscript.Shell firings further supports the malicious nature of the script, indicating it's designed to download and execute further stages.

Heuristics 8

  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (10 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 https://moneyquote.ja.deals/assets/jcCwxvuSRpES7VhWxj/
    • https://vestaseguridad.com.ar/wp-content/7JD9gufnwG/
    • https://mail.reddeeducacionvirtual.com/wp-includes/BqJi1K/
    • http://veluxcounterapi.orbitalwaves.it/assets/WW9KfK84
    • http://mylibass.in/wp-content/SYERoa6um9/
    • https://www.edhacare.com/Fox-C404/XDEQNngeH6Dg/
    • http://openhouse.co.zw/admin/l0nzhQ/
    • http://ilifetrend.com/wp-admin/qC/
    • http://sedes.si/wordpress/UVpGY5pQBX5X7pMxHs/
    • https://farmand

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
c49f2df77c50e10269216d97c3efdf7c32f9f18ba5d8fd42a9b144f48e100040
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 5709 bytes