Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 77aa45335645cdbb…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

151.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: d7e4cf3a2bd824cfea4cf5d5c241b672 SHA-1: e2093c4c9213abb2030d30d0abc814a33d54fbc0 SHA-256: 77aa45335645cdbb51ed7508e570a4f41d3ca942fee283dfcedbe071128231fc
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 file containing VBA macros, specifically a Workbook_Open macro that is configured to execute. Heuristics indicate it's a dropper that reconstructs and downloads payloads from multiple URLs. The VBA code also attempts to create objects for Wscript.Shell and RDS.DataSpace, and writes batch and VBScript files to the programdata directory, indicating a multi-stage infection process.

Heuristics 8

  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (5 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.EmotetExcel02222-9938901-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02222-9938901-0
  • 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 https://store.uxdsummit.com/wp-admin/VfgBSQa7Z/
    • https://glowrentals.com/wp-admin/f1zeAKGTnS6I/
    • http://candisee.bminteractivegroup.com/1g94ngo/2n7lJoPuPDEanPcX/
    • http://bachilleratoporciclos.org/wp-content/zR/
    • http://formula8020.com/css/JCuR6OE404DgR/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
df1eb14c222394595c0518b49eec2b55ed9573146c5f1717dedceddd2e199a2b		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 12041 bytes

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