Emotet Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis — malicious · 788671eabe3e67d2

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

80.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-06-16

MD5: aafeb3616dced7667185c018b9c8b99a SHA-1: 5f8fb9f5bf6e4da9d7a0475125e954e87691b037 SHA-256: 788671eabe3e67d2c8bb0ba244066b0d855ca21d091515fc19b53ecda783d455

200 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK

T1059.005 Visual Basic T1204.002 Malicious File

The critical heuristics OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN, OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME, and OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN indicate the presence of an Excel 4.0 macro with an Auto_Open entry that uses dangerous functions like RUN. The ClamAV detection further confirms this is Emotet. The macro reconstructs several URLs which are likely used to download and execute a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 4

Excel 4.0 Auto_Open defined name critical OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME

oletools recovered an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry from an Excel 4.0 macro sheet. The raw BIFF name can be tokenized or partially opaque to byte-string checks, but the recovered macro listing confirms the workbook has an XLM auto-execution entry.
XLM Auto_Open with dangerous formula APIs critical OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN

Excel 4.0 macro sheet contains an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry and dangerous XLM formula APIs that can invoke programs, write files, or transfer control without VBA.
ClamAV: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ea81817e7f807ab1-9952142-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION

ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ea81817e7f807ab1-9952142-0
Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro sheet present medium OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN

Workbook contains an Excel 4.0 macro sheet sub-stream — XLM is rarely seen in modern legitimate workbooks and was a major Office malware vector during 2020-2022.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

Filename	Kind	Source	Size
`xlm_macros.txt` `2fdf21f2db447f9be93416b81af1c740576c18d6efe5c8c6f3d215a65c941f1d`	xlm-macro	oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing)	6790 bytes

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