Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 498e7ccca53ea1c4…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

150.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 43005b3a3e3c91230c4328af8f87482c SHA-1: c0cefa99650f3e2da0ad4b295841dd604eb9d52f SHA-256: 498e7ccca53ea1c4a96b01a5696b7b033b5a89e0ecceadd5da6b8dfcd06888db
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The critical ClamAV detection and multiple high-severity heuristics, including OLE_VBA_MACROS, OLE_VBA_WBOPEN, and OLE_VBA_PCODE_AUTOEXEC_EXEC, indicate malicious VBA code. The Workbook_Open macro is designed to execute obfuscated commands. Specifically, the script attempts to create a batch file at 'c:\programdata\jledshf.bat' and then execute it. The embedded PowerShell command within the batch file is heavily obfuscated but appears to be a downloader for a second-stage payload from multiple URLs. The presence of 'Wscript.Shell' and 'CreateObject' further supports the execution of external commands.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • 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
006c4f4d54d1c9bb906763adb0bd849cdbbe9d88f3fa78ad2d18ef6987f96c37
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 8906 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.