Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 7883f682799420d2…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

122.5 KB Created: 2022-02-09 09:48:26 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 3f20ffe3c904f70baecf2c94fc5fc732 SHA-1: 6481c60c7f6cad20d0f9a47f274c22ac1a02585e SHA-256: 7883f682799420d244ed410add6d0d326272717edf35e7cb02a2b2e179b5ec8d
262 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 a Workbook_Open VBA macro. This macro is designed to execute a second-stage payload by downloading it from one of the 12 embedded URLs. The ClamAV detection and the nature of the macro strongly indicate the Emotet family, which commonly uses this technique for initial infection and payload delivery.

Heuristics 7

  • 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: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0
  • 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://midnightsilvercrafters.com/store/wBjNOUw/
    • http://tempral.com/NATE_05_22_2009/BI710N4cQ6R3/
    • https://redington.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/3JVuVx7QUM/
    • https://uhc.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/0EqfdeznntlOpaIP2Qv/
    • https://servilogic.n
    • https://comezmuhendislik.com/ljfrmm/VTpHRFWoORAHnRQ3aQL/
    • http://webmail.glemedical.com/wp-content/J1M2xxodH/
    • http://toto.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/i826vbcVgRJ/
    • https://golfpia.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/oEicpDnEkk/
    • https://garyjharris.com/cgi-bin/0hH/
    • https://vietnam.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/PfSVQagusZy7AaMw/
    • https://vinculinc.karmatechmediaworks.com/wp-content/VlcOPPwgidWlXDJNs6/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
1c41984599ddab22ecea8fe26f54e8c62d71db42dd76713da6efccb8e0bb6891
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 52352 bytes