Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 760d4e37f3583f37…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 6d0fe01753e8d663dde6af7444fe9d00 SHA-1: aab3a3ca6371debe3d5d9355aa56e4e68ef9b242 SHA-256: 760d4e37f3583f37577f58eeecd2142629fec557fa59368269297c20564edf5c
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The sample is an Excel file containing VBA macros, specifically a Workbook_Open macro, which is a common technique for Emotet. The macro uses CreateObject to interact with Wscript.Shell and RDS.DataSpace, and it attempts to execute a batch file located at 'c:\programdata\uidpjewl.bat'. This batch file contains a heavily obfuscated PowerShell command that downloads and executes a second-stage payload from multiple URLs. The presence of Wscript.Shell and the obfuscated PowerShell downloader strongly indicate a malicious 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