Emotet — Office (OOXML) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 5ab85e0bc7bdeabb…

MALICIOUS

Office (OOXML) / .XLSX

92.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 UTC Authoring application: Microsoft Excel 12.0000
MD5: dfa28a8e86bf53de1af327a9826330d8 SHA-1: b6ad1a935014abfa055b6ab72c4c7ded4e7cc88a SHA-256: 5ab85e0bc7bdeabbf98b09a8069d9832a15c7146e99fb4d21622b9b1f6d41899
260 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The file contains a Workbook_Open macro that is heavily obfuscated and uses CreateObject to execute a second-stage payload. ClamAV identifies this as an Emotet downloader. The obfuscated VBA code attempts to download files from multiple URLs, including 'http://harperoproducuts.com/Merchan2/ARSf1LIcOauh1rDIh/', and save them as 'c:\programdata\yhjlswle.vbs' and 'c:\programdata\ughldskbhn.bat' for execution.

Heuristics 6

  • Obfuscated auto-exec VBA loader critical OLE_VBA_OBFUSCATED_AUTOEXEC_LOADER
    Auto-exec VBA reconstructs strings with a heavy custom decoder (numeric char-array, repeated hex-string decode, or junk-token Replace removal) and feeds them to a COM-instantiation or execution sink. This obfuscated-loader shape keeps CreateObject/Shell/URL indicators out of the macro source.
  • ClamAV: Xls.Downloader.EmotetRed02221-9938910-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.EmotetRed02221-9938910-0
  • 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 project inside OOXML medium OOXML_VBA
    Document contains a VBA project — VBA macros present

Extracted artifacts 2

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
de7bcbc45ff0a77d05d9af662bacc316e71be11a980e94f6673e556a5dd9d1bc		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source from OOXML) 12808 bytes
vbaProject_00.bin
bddd9f4f4588ca13b60e4f324ad3aea734a3712cf149cf904d1faf2396549821		 vba-project OOXML VBA project: xl/vbaProject.bin 37888 bytes

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