Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 65cc6979b3048f40…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

123.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 2ac9fcf44683148f5aa98eb9189d18ea SHA-1: bf205103b5fe96d9f74ec6c7d40c7c70a0b26a9d SHA-256: 65cc6979b3048f40eb3e3f1bb6fc7789fa3d4bb392d65b03edbd096d908520e5
362 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample contains heavily obfuscated VBA macros, including a Workbook_Open auto-execution loader. This loader is designed to reconstruct and download payloads from a list of 11 embedded URLs. The presence of Wscript.Shell and CreateObject calls, along with the ClamAV signature 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02220-9938909-0', strongly indicates Emotet downloader activity.

Heuristics 9

  • 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.
  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (11 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.EmotetRed02220-9938909-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02220-9938909-0
  • 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 http://harperhouseproducts.com/Merchant2/ARsf1LIcOauhH1rDrIh/
    • http://holubvideo.com/eln-images/zqqgZ0YXaPiWbF/
    • http://chastongroditski.com/eln-images/skSsC
    • http://seacupps.com/eln-images/AYvykzg/
    • http://ericandrobin.com/cgi/qRe8dRaG2HDNOOG1/
    • http://sosantiques.com/cgi/9ii/
    • https://greenlawnirrigation.net/GLI_New/JRlt3mOiezE/
    • https://on-lineventures.com/cgi/ks0Mp/
    • http://blog.logo123.com/wp-content/19G04LjA1UcE1tN8/
    • http://magicblog.tatamotors.com/wp-includes/7faN9/
    • http://intrablog.tatamotors.com/wp-includes/MGGi5zcZrkolFH9/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
de7bcbc45ff0a77d05d9af662bacc316e71be11a980e94f6673e556a5dd9d1bc		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 12808 bytes

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