Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 4a8963c13906d843…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

70.6 KB Created: 2022-01-20 19:00:43 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 21df993800cf669ad6b181b1dfc050b5 SHA-1: 74c2e20d06c005da2b1e45c236d7eed0c65d00b0 SHA-256: 4a8963c13906d8437eaaceb39a1fd8b65446b82b8f8c0f16e1e4dec89b4c2d37
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment

The critical heuristic OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME indicates the presence of an Excel 4.0 Auto_Open macro, which is a common execution vector for Emotet. ClamAV detection further supports this attribution. The macro is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload, as suggested by the ClamAV signature 'Doc.Downloader'.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9937164-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9937164-0
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
7f1f89a8b36a750dced08313a4e4f056192a6eac7194357c673dbbd2670a1a18		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 4219 bytes

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