Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 5b99ab35b6977b76…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: af716c9a382eb7450080ff1b8904aba4 SHA-1: 2c866ca83bebd7aea6083d18f32339e85fac1df7 SHA-256: 5b99ab35b6977b76e614e761123bdc0af679b492381d4202f6d3da2bd2638a0c
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The file contains a Workbook_Open VBA macro that utilizes CreateObject to execute a Windows Script Host (Wscript.Shell) command. This macro is designed to drop and execute a VBScript payload from 'c:\programdata\tjspowj.vbs' and a batch file from 'c:\programdata\uidpjewl.bat'. The batch file contains obfuscated commands that appear to download and execute further stages from multiple URLs, indicating a downloader functionality. The ClamAV detection explicitly names this as an Emotet variant.

Heuristics 6

  • ClamAV: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0
  • 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

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
faf50200d5a9adeeda00cc1da1bbf8f6abf0317a1e97a58db8ae804ba12ba446
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 13985 bytes