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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 296451d4b8f63a54…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

193.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: af0085ef1ecc6c26d9e60325b039e8c8 SHA-1: 9bc68f902861f51692c51c4bc5eb2a4392dc620f SHA-256: 296451d4b8f63a54e5ccdc00321c48b5f47e10ff18991864beb5970c74a7494b
120 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell T1204.002 Malicious File

The file is an Excel 4.0 macro-enabled spreadsheet. Heuristics indicate the presence of an Auto_Open macro that uses dangerous API functions, specifically the RUN function. This suggests the macro is designed to execute arbitrary code, likely downloading and running a second-stage payload from the embedded URL. The document body contains a partial URL that may be related to the payload delivery.

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.
  • XLM Auto_Open with dangerous formula APIs high OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet contains an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry and dangerous XLM formula APIs that can invoke programs, write files, or transfer control without VBA.
  • 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://www.iec.ch
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/
    • http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
    • http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceEvent#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceRef#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/photoshop/1.0/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
732bfa752b66213cfed6fb95799054a82ee4bf330cc7b9914a7ec49aa3f08d0f		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 12026 bytes

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