Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6da5624fe25bf23a…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

122.5 KB Created: 2022-02-09 09:48:26 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: b44ad239b17fe88fb8a2b217d9fba141 SHA-1: 752d6a26b0badb343dfb6a328ab05e4c29218b60 SHA-256: 6da5624fe25bf23a74c4860deb76b4cb309a4926fe9847c4f8f4c7c1ad08563d
262 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 VBA macros, specifically a Workbook_Open macro that executes a CreateObject call. This macro is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from one of the 12 embedded URLs. The ClamAV detection and the nature of the VBA code strongly suggest it belongs to the Emotet family, which is known for its downloader capabilities.

Heuristics 7

  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (12 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
  • 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://midnightsilvercrafters.com/store/wBjNOUw/
    • http://tempral.com/NATE_05_22_2009/BI710N4cQ6R3/
    • https://redington.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/3JVuVx7QUM/
    • https://uhc.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/0EqfdeznntlOpaIP2Qv/
    • https://servilogic.n
    • https://comezmuhendislik.com/ljfrmm/VTpHRFWoORAHnRQ3aQL/
    • http://webmail.glemedical.com/wp-content/J1M2xxodH/
    • http://toto.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/i826vbcVgRJ/
    • https://golfpia.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/oEicpDnEkk/
    • https://garyjharris.com/cgi-bin/0hH/
    • https://vietnam.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/PfSVQagusZy7AaMw/
    • https://vinculinc.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/VlcOPPwgidWlXDJNs6/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
718039e02a356b42336b2928eed7de329f675ee0d0069ec9249f7401fc97e358
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 52352 bytes