Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 5f211b21bdf27c37…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

151.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: cd3aa36e7156d213a560a598a0819171 SHA-1: d76f300665870eafb07b1a0ed050824676cb51da SHA-256: 5f211b21bdf27c3727a6b7000a890c5e6003a11f75cd95d79033150e1fde4cc5
302 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The sample contains VBA macros that execute a Workbook_Open event, which in turn uses CreateObject to launch a PowerShell command. This command is heavily obfuscated but appears to download and execute a second-stage payload from one of the embedded URLs. The presence of Emotet-related heuristics and the specific ClamAV detection name strongly suggest this family.

Heuristics 8

  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (5 URLs) critical OLE_VBA_CELL_DROPPER_URL
    VBA reads worksheet cells, strips junk substrings via Replace(), and base64/UTF-16 decodes the result into a PowerShell EncodedCommand payload. The download URL is never contiguous in the file bytes; it was recovered by removing the macro's Replace() junk tokens from the cell strings and decoding the staged base64.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02222-9938901-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02222-9938901-0
  • 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
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL https://store.uxdsummit.com/wp-admin/VfgBSQa7Z/
    • https://glowrentals.com/wp-admin/f1zeAKGTnS6I/
    • http://candisee.bminteractivegroup.com/1g94ngo/2n7lJoPuPDEanPcX/
    • http://bachilleratoporciclos.org/wp-content/zR/
    • http://formula8020.com/css/JCuR6OE404DgR/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
df1eb14c222394595c0518b49eec2b55ed9573146c5f1717dedceddd2e199a2b		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 12041 bytes

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