Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 66b24ea71ad864d4…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

151.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: c371bb5580e351d8b634f07574a4104e SHA-1: c577a99f3b9ab60b7faec423f73913bef3931e05 SHA-256: 66b24ea71ad864d464779be340cef35f3b180bc85fb97f6597e715b263d0ad45
302 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 VBA macros that are configured to execute automatically upon opening the workbook. These macros reconstruct a batch file path and content, which is then executed. The batch file content itself is heavily obfuscated but appears to download and execute further payloads from the provided URLs. The ClamAV detection name 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02222-9938901-0' strongly suggests an Emotet family infection.

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