Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 5b5defff8a23b9c8…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

133.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 018bdfc677f48f864f1c0fdf2aa23c21 SHA-1: ae01be2d957aa84b957bc99ad74f43c5ea24bc3b SHA-256: 5b5defff8a23b9c8bc6f5ddd34fc27897c254e5eddb2360194cef0e2e7f6092b
340 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The file is an Excel spreadsheet containing a Workbook_Open macro that is heavily obfuscated and designed to execute a second-stage payload. Heuristics indicate the use of CreateObject, Shell, and execution tokens, along with references to PowerShell and Wscript.Shell. The macro attempts to download a payload from a list of URLs, including 'http://afie ti.com/b/MzLJFqjFbjW/', and save it to 'c:\programadata\'. The ClamAV detection name 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0' strongly suggests the Emotet family.

Heuristics 8

  • 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: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • Reference to PowerShell high SC_STR_POWERSHELL
    Reference to PowerShell
  • 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

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
2371f091b169c7918c945b8974b3f60437212f84d1a9d429701826689481f8d8		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 6376 bytes

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