Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 3b3fcecd028eb77a…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: ad60be9531ce23831deca84863a7487a SHA-1: c247e2d211e946f52832d9d53f65644f09f4c715 SHA-256: 3b3fcecd028eb77ab64fa6b47ef5a12b6defdd18c73a1ae8f80f6591b2bab775
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The file contains a Workbook_Open VBA macro that is triggered automatically when the spreadsheet is opened. This macro utilizes CreateObject to execute Windows Script Host, which in turn runs obfuscated VBScript code. The VBScript code attempts to download payloads from multiple URLs, including 'http://youlanda.org/eln-image/n8DPZISf/', and saves them as '.vbs' and '.bat' files in the 'c:\programdata\' directory. This behavior is characteristic of Emotet, a known downloader malware.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0
  • 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
faf50200d5a9adeeda00cc1da1bbf8f6abf0317a1e97a58db8ae804ba12ba446
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 13985 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.