Emotet — Office (OLE) malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6aa0628194addc53…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE)

234.1 KB Created: 2020-08-14 21:43:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 28f1546bd4b1a3eda8b305c6cef972da SHA-1: c96348c452e950e431a165e45def224339a53324 SHA-256: 6aa0628194addc5361ab720044fb4d55b01417b2b70fb68f38a4b46757f7b36d
262 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample contains VBA macros, including a Document_Open macro and a hidden UserForm command stager, which are indicative of Emotet. The ClamAV detection further supports this family attribution. The macro's obfuscated nature and use of CreateObject suggest it's designed to download and execute a secondary payload.

Heuristics 7

  • VBA UserForm hidden-property command stager critical OLE_VBA_USERFORM_HIDDEN_COMMAND_STAGER
    VBA auto-exec macro creates a COM object from a decoded variable and reconstructs command text through Split/Join and hidden UserForm properties such as ControlTipText, Tag, Pages, or HelpContextId. This is a high-confidence macro downloader/loader shape seen in the reviewed OLE set, but it is not an Office CVE exploit primitive.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9348583-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9348583-0
  • Document_Open macro high OLE_VBA_DOCOPEN
    Document_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://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
34c0de223fb155b200470dd74532eb17cc8088993a15437bad69cdda5f3fc0cc
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 7690 bytes