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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 4d3509404975ac2f…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

325.0 KB Created: 2018-12-06 20:43:11 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-12-12
MD5: 1e55e38e66412f537356d20393129372 SHA-1: 580cffc35861ea1be69a68217e1e191280dbbc95 SHA-256: 4d3509404975ac2f99aa7075754c08feec46d0dbffe0f8d9e0ff764aee6c95f9
422 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer T1204.002 Malicious File

This XLS file contains malicious VBA macros, specifically a Workbook_Open macro that utilizes WScript.Shell to download and execute a file. The script appears to be obfuscated, but the critical heuristic firings indicate a high likelihood of it downloading and executing a second-stage payload. The presence of the 'macros.bas' artifact further supports this. The exact download URL and executed payload could not be fully reconstructed due to obfuscation.

Heuristics 10

  • Shell() call in VBA critical OLE_VBA_SHELL
    Shell() call in VBA
  • WScript.Shell usage critical OLE_VBA_WSCRIPT
    WScript.Shell usage
  • VBA downloads and writes a file to disk critical OLE_VBA_HTTP_DROP_EXEC
    VBA reads an HTTP response body and writes it to disk (ADODB.Stream SaveToFile). Combined with the auto-exec/Shell paths this is a download-drop dropper even when the COM ProgIDs are built dynamically to evade keyword scanning.
  • ClamAV: Xls.Malware.Valyria-10032137-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Malware.Valyria-10032137-0
  • 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.
  • VBA macros detected medium OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains VBA macro code
  • Suspicious extracted artifact info 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7230f71349dd2f8004205b5799e4e4d71d93349fee507ce87b9fca414996b816
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 29390 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact contains 113 long base64-like blob(s).