Malicious Office (OOXML) — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 1b550755968c5ae4…

MALICIOUS

Office (OOXML)

746.5 KB Created: 2020-05-11 14:19:29 UTC Authoring application: Microsoft Excel 15.0300 First seen: 2020-12-25
MD5: 8abfc9990b17676225ad574ecbea2c75 SHA-1: b323de38d0aae0d83a8446e26e535f55f714cdb8 SHA-256: 1b550755968c5ae4f510ebd7d6aa31e4dd1bdf1124929a65bcffa012696eeb30
182 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer T1204.002 Malicious File

This Excel file contains Excel 4.0 macros that are designed to download and execute a payload. The macros explicitly call WinAPI functions such as URLDownloadToFileA and ShellExecuteA, and reconstruct a URL from a cell array to fetch the payload from http://oregano.pk/21.gif. This indicates a downloader or droppper functionality.

Heuristics 4

  • Excel 4.0 macro sheet (1 sheet(s)) critical 2 related findings OOXML_XLM_MACROSHEET
    Spreadsheet contains an Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro sheet — XLM was a major Office malware vector during 2020-2022 and evaded many VBA-focused controls before Microsoft tightened XLM defaults. Even legitimate XLM use is rare in modern workbooks. The macro sheet is stored as XLSB/BIFF12 binary content, which many XML-only OOXML scanners miss.
  • Binary XLM macro sheet with WinAPI/download strings critical OOXML_XLM_BINARY_WINAPI_STRINGS
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet is stored as BIFF12/XLSB binary data and contains Win32 download or process-execution API strings such as URLDownloadToFileA, ShellExecuteA, or CreateDirectoryA. These strings are high-signal in XLM macro sheets and catch payload-download macros that XML-formula scanners cannot parse.
  • URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (1 URL) critical OOXML_XLM_CELL_ARRAY_URL
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet stages its payload URL across individual numeric cells (one ASCII charcode per cell), inside an embedded HTA that uses VBScript Chr()/&-concat obfuscation, or split across multi-char fragment cells a download formula concatenates by reference (=A1&A2&… / CONCATENATE(...)). 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 BIFF12 record stream of every worksheet and macrosheet part and decoding RK/inline-string/shared-string cells in row-major and column-major order plus FORMULA cell-reference concatenation in token order.
  • 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://oregano.pk/21.gif Referenced by macro

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_sheet_00.bin xlm-macrosheet OOXML XLM macro sheet: xl/macrosheets/sheet1.bin 53822 bytes
SHA-256: 515c10c4872e96e95a6f740883cb77185b9d8ad5fe182b1ef666bdad9dc92f8a
Preview script
First 1,000 lines of the extracted script
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