Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 36c609304eedcc04…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

88.5 KB Created: 2022-02-14 05:58:53 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-02-22
MD5: feb9fdc7a23e5b7a353d79222a62c026 SHA-1: 8165110f7b5d464ad1ff4b247b3b2f524bfde59b SHA-256: 36c609304eedcc0449e569c57f238cc9a8215e5b4a9ed40bfbce9dc27ec9653f
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample is identified as malicious by ClamAV with a specific Emotet signature. Static analysis reveals the presence of VBA macros, including a Workbook_Open auto-execution event that utilizes CreateObject, indicating an attempt to run external scripts. The extracted document body contains obfuscated VBScript code that, when deobfuscated, reveals commands to download and execute a DLL from 'c:\programdata\oiphilfj.dll' using 'wscript.exe'. This strongly suggests the macro's purpose is to download and execute a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Emotet02220-9940037-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Emotet02220-9940037-0
  • 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.
  • Suspicious extracted artifact high EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE
    One or more files extracted from inside this sample matched static suspicious-content checks such as script obfuscation, encoded payload blobs, packed data, or execution/download terms.
  • VBA macros detected medium OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains VBA macro code

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
98ce64e756a4ee3d4f776c1541f7f3ad0f966d786db88eda74f9a833f3a74b83
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 11705 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.