Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6aef1d2719ea6622…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 6c174327b04c1e006d2ce69b9529dafb SHA-1: f41da6653d91d263c22fdd2b7b1327bb6c1c351c SHA-256: 6aef1d2719ea662211e1e9473273c70a45d58c69b8d0c8f023024c5c70cfef35
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The file is an Excel spreadsheet containing a Workbook_Open VBA macro. This macro utilizes CreateObject to instantiate Wscript.Shell, which is then used to execute a batch file. The batch file contains obfuscated commands that appear to download and execute a second-stage payload from multiple URLs. The ClamAV signature also explicitly identifies this as an Emotet downloader.

Heuristics 6

  • 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

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