Malicious Office (OLE) / .XLS — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 60daac95bcce2b30…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

105.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 390f877688273a8c2cc420cb48a97cb1 SHA-1: 054958d50815805d677097275d994d46039037a3 SHA-256: 60daac95bcce2b3021bb614a8fff918ac978e2f86e11ccaf9e8e50a1273f8d72
120 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1059.005 Visual Basic T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample contains an Excel 4.0 macro sheet with an Auto_Open entry, indicating automatic execution upon opening. It also includes heuristics for macro-enable lures and impersonation of DocuSign, suggesting a social engineering approach to bypass security. The macro likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload from one of the provided URLs, such as 'http://wordpress.nightingale.com/overview_user_2/nrjxvwss/'.

Heuristics 4

  • Excel 4.0 Auto_Open defined name critical OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME
    oletools recovered an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry from an Excel 4.0 macro sheet. The raw BIFF name can be tokenized or partially opaque to byte-string checks, but the recovered macro listing confirms the workbook has an XLM auto-execution entry.
  • Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro sheet present medium OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN
    Workbook contains an Excel 4.0 macro sheet sub-stream — XLM is rarely seen in modern legitimate workbooks and was a major Office malware vector during 2020-2022.
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings
  • Document signing service impersonation lure medium SE_DOCUSIGN_LURE
    Document impersonates DocuSign, Adobe Sign, or a similar signing service in a signing-request context

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
1f3a9e9f425000bccc6ecbbba5371f1a3b0a17ea072b52992d451728caf3ab45
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 3742 bytes