Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 75b423fc99a10518…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 23f640a08dd082dd2903318dd6500535 SHA-1: a27d165503706be9c01bcab1e85f9912f681cece SHA-256: 75b423fc99a1051828ec044e71abdf9652b8616207fb4bf23583cde44b23cc4c
302 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The file contains VBA macros, including a Workbook_Open event, which is a common technique for executing malicious code upon opening. The macros are designed to reconstruct and download payloads from multiple URLs, as indicated by the OLE_VBA_CELL_DROPPER_URL heuristic. The ClamAV detection as 'Xls.Downloader.Emotet' strongly suggests the Emotet family, known for its downloader capabilities. The reconstructed command line in the DOC BODY section indicates the execution of a VBScript or BAT file from the programdata directory, likely to further download and execute additional stages.

Heuristics 8

  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (7 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
  • 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://lbsbriefs.com/cgi/2kl8X826xEKeuhI/
    • http://howebeautiful.com/eln-images/tyj208/
    • http://lazylargomotels.com/cgi/wZrYbJ/
    • http://sleepstarlite-ozark.com/batesville/UjX/
    • http://osaka.musicaldog.com/05-set/YLBOd/
    • https://egemenrulman.com/Fox-C404/qrr2OCShGJGH06Gm/
    • http://skyridgedesigns.com/eln-images/38pr2cu3xt2Ai/

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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