Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 27ef3a20b4ae92e0…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

70.7 KB Created: 2022-01-20 19:00:43 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 80a610c1b3fe990e8b27c3fdb0cf89ab SHA-1: 88c620ad5b548700b124e8e47022035cf007b176 SHA-256: 27ef3a20b4ae92e0c1475f0a9537371020e7a592fce6913bf24a21ba0ad9ffb1
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic

The critical heuristic OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME indicates the presence of an Excel 4.0 Auto_Open macro, which is a common execution vector for Emotet. ClamAV detection further supports the Emotet family attribution. The macro sheet is designed to automatically execute upon opening the document, likely to download and execute a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9937164-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9937164-0
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
7f1f89a8b36a750dced08313a4e4f056192a6eac7194357c673dbbd2670a1a18		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 4219 bytes

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