Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 75c8c4b024da3327…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

150.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: d704522249b9eb55595be417d7693ea1 SHA-1: 7a85a111fd25dd8e8a0c6601ba8a0c012607b3ee SHA-256: 75c8c4b024da33277bd9a32299c828ba65cd2179099ed45185acdc18d299c7e5
302 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 document containing VBA macros that are automatically executed upon opening the workbook. The macros reconstruct and attempt to download payloads from multiple URLs, indicating a downloader functionality. The presence of Emotet-related heuristics and the specific ClamAV detection name strongly suggest the Emotet family.

Heuristics 8

  • 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: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • 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://actividades.laforetlanguages.com/wp-admin/BlkdOKDXL/
    • http://sbcopylive.com.br/rjuz/w/
    • https://trasix.com/wp-admin/y5Aa1jt0Sp2Qk/
    • https://www.parkinsons.co.in/abc/Y6Y0fTbUEg6/
    • https://biz.merlin.ua/
    • http://bruckevn.site/3yztzzvh/nmY4wZfbYL/
    • https://pardiskood.com/wp-content/NR/
    • https://daujimaharajmandir.org/wp-includes/63De/
    • https://datasits.com/wp-includes/Zkj4QO/
    • https://anugerahmasinternasi
    • https://atmedic.cl/sistemas/3ZbsUAU/
    • https://anwaralbasateen.com/Fox-C404/mDHkfgebMRzmGKBy/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
006c4f4d54d1c9bb906763adb0bd849cdbbe9d88f3fa78ad2d18ef6987f96c37
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 8906 bytes