Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 78e52c1c67bf51ba…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

151.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 6fd72ce2ab9943eb387b916251774c42 SHA-1: 2af4e15abef8e056c8d242beb6f127e5c6f6c6cc SHA-256: 78e52c1c67bf51bad94a03356494e64d13e65083a4be2b42a6b4e32175d4a84b
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 contains VBA macros, including a Workbook_Open event, which is a common Emotet infection vector. The macros are designed to reconstruct and execute a batch file from a hardcoded string, which in turn downloads and executes payloads from a list of embedded URLs. The presence of 'CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")' and the reconstructed batch file path 'c:\programdata\jledshf.bat' strongly indicate a downloader functionality.

Heuristics 8

  • URL reconstructed from VBA cell-staged base64 dropper (10 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 https://moneyquote.ja.deals/assets/jcCwxvuSRpES7VhWxj/
    • https://vestaseguridad.com.ar/wp-content/7JD9gufnwG/
    • https://mail.reddeeducacionvirtual.com/wp-includes/BqJi1K/
    • http://veluxcounterapi.orbitalwaves.it/assets/WW9KfK84
    • http://mylibass.in/wp-content/SYERoa6um9/
    • https://www.edhacare.com/Fox-C404/XDEQNngeH6Dg/
    • http://openhouse.co.zw/admin/l0nzhQ/
    • http://ilifetrend.com/wp-admin/qC/
    • http://sedes.si/wordpress/UVpGY5pQBX5X7pMxHs/
    • https://farmand

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
c49f2df77c50e10269216d97c3efdf7c32f9f18ba5d8fd42a9b144f48e100040		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 5709 bytes

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