Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 689398e7cc649fd7…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: dad8d812c1c4fc72008aaa40b5e30530 SHA-1: a94ca68f4807afcd18ff41836604d8d07b9557f6 SHA-256: 689398e7cc649fd7d31f7c20e84f5262e7d799e895043c398afbb100f43ae487
302 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The presence of a Workbook_Open macro, CreateObject calls, and a ClamAV signature indicating 'Xls.Downloader.Emotet' strongly suggests Emotet activity. The macro is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from one of the embedded URLs, specifically reconstructing the command to download from 'http://alivesystems.com/eln-images/pm2rSsnVM/' or 'http://don-lee.com/_notes/U6H1'. The embedded URLs and the reconstructed paths for `tjspowj.vbs` and `uidpjewl.bat` are key indicators of this downloader functionality.

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: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0
  • 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://creedmoorpartners.com/eln-images/wEYKd5KJZETheBswq/
    • http://mattersoffact.com/cgi/E0C1vtSqt/
    • http://pureplatinumband.com/Schedule/EW24AYJCvBpN8Gc/
    • http://homehandyworks.com/eln-images/xFIDPfs4SS1yw7ghXXk/
    • http://hi-techaudio.com/di

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
faf50200d5a9adeeda00cc1da1bbf8f6abf0317a1e97a58db8ae804ba12ba446		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 13985 bytes

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