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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 42eb3a6818058c57…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

367.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 75f74642d23e65f79251dc21d66bea40 SHA-1: 229dc47b7b4a96f7966922f9794e156d4d485bbf SHA-256: 42eb3a6818058c574d6ed05a123c634dfd1f4033230f77541b6375fdc0f6479e
102 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic for Applications T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample is an Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro-enabled spreadsheet. It contains an Auto_Open macro, which is a common technique for automatic execution upon opening. The document body and extracted macro content indicate that the user is prompted to enable macros. The XLM macros are designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from the URLs: https://smartpalakatva.com/edQsUZOLlE/th.html and https://pilstlcommodities.com/Ov4FlB3lpy/th.html. The presence of the Auto_Open macro and the embedded URLs strongly suggest a malicious downloader.

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.
  • 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.
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings
  • 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 https://smartpalakatva.com/edQsUZOLlE/th.html
    • https://pilstlcommodities.com/Ov4FlB3lpy/th.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
e61304013e31eadd8bf35fc5d3e6cbadd61463966f2a2d09ae24f65eb0ee3106
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8349 bytes