Emotet Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis — malicious · 63ae139eb8b19b3d

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

95.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-07-13

MD5: 5cf9dea564be6225a10331c101773d69 SHA-1: b9954a7f25eb50b043439fec7e3e679f0adaf31d SHA-256: 63ae139eb8b19b3df21676bbb9cc6baf46201e8064eb009e9c339a92d9d66a6d

200 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK

T1059.005 Visual Basic T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The file is identified as malicious by ClamAV and exhibits critical heuristic firings indicating the presence of Excel 4.0 macros with an Auto_Open entry. These macros utilize dangerous functions, specifically the RUN function, which is commonly used to download and execute secondary payloads. The ClamAV signature also suggests the Emotet family.

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.
XLM Auto_Open with dangerous formula APIs critical OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN

Excel 4.0 macro sheet contains an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry and dangerous XLM formula APIs that can invoke programs, write files, or transfer control without VBA.
ClamAV: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ea81817e7f807ab1-9952142-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION

ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ea81817e7f807ab1-9952142-0
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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

Filename	Kind	Source	Size
`xlm_macros.txt` `168e7c20400a87ec53e7f85fc05780d92d7341ae7fdc256e3891ea4b48ec5adc`	xlm-macro	oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing)	8132 bytes

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