Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6899226e36aa7e57…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

144.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 54c52c125a687e314a5599fdaa432544 SHA-1: 4070b0e132fb14440c15412f77436049679d5ca8 SHA-256: 6899226e36aa7e57b701ea8813124f45f99d4b99f893dc72ed3e224d54630830
302 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The sample is an Excel file containing a Workbook_Open VBA macro that is designed to execute obfuscated code. This code attempts to download and execute a second-stage payload from a list of URLs, including http://chupahfashion.com/eh6bwxk/bowptl/xdAiCtVd/. The presence of Emotet-related heuristics and the known behavior of this family strongly indicate its involvement.

Heuristics 8

  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (10 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.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • 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://chupahfashion.com/eh6bwxk/bowptl/xdAiCtVd/
    • http://id-tiara.com/well-known/AW7ddGt/
    • http://crm.avionxpress.com/media/H4fjpmz/
    • http://liaisonltd.com/-/wJqOY64M/
    • https://giskunihar.com/wp-content/4meL
    • https://albbd.online/wp-content/wUw03JZqT3/
    • https://detroitsignsandwraps.com/wp-admin/bPmzjYidYDLUT/
    • https://tranhgohoangthiet.com/Fox-C/E9ZETOCG4gWfNONRKWG/
    • http://a-bc.cn/img/nhBjlyOAmot/
    • https://stavki-na-sporte.ru/w

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
e5cfab216070fe1e4cc99c114be1118111da457aa00152d1441ffb86ba5a4299		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 8906 bytes

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.