Emotet — Office (OOXML) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6039e38f9ce16cd7…

MALICIOUS

Office (OOXML) / .XLSX

92.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 UTC Authoring application: Microsoft Excel 12.0000
MD5: 5c7807b23db2bba4ef33a4ea63cc26b3 SHA-1: 7471abf319539cd7d7bc5277fc021229a6f8da1a SHA-256: 6039e38f9ce16cd7d3b24eb77babe634ca2d32285c98333e0e5ffdeee9b841d5
260 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The sample contains a heavily obfuscated VBA macro that executes upon opening the workbook, indicated by the Workbook_Open heuristic. This macro utilizes CreateObject to call Wscript.Shell, which then attempts to download and execute payloads from several URLs, including 'http://harperoproducts.com/Merchandise2/ARSf1LIcOauh1rDiR/'. The ClamAV signature 'Xls.Downloader.EmotetRed02221-9938910-0' and the presence of obfuscated auto-exec loaders strongly suggest the Emotet family.

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
ffe461c36bb1eb95d1516b60747bdd335b76b010bc7781ebc4bc7f09ad0b0c3a
vba-project OOXML VBA project: xl/vbaProject.bin 37888 bytes