Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 7bcc81bd2ed65710…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

141.9 KB Created: 2022-01-19 09:31:16 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 50c327c92589a1bdc7266f2fa3f727d5 SHA-1: 9848353da325f5a5d4cdb76edb4554672134a7f2 SHA-256: 7bcc81bd2ed657103d32c3786d4ed067a429f084675d83b1a7b4517c48680820
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The file is an Excel 4.0 macro-enabled workbook detected by ClamAV as Emotet. The presence of an Auto_Open defined name indicates that the XLM macro will execute automatically upon opening the workbook. This macro is designed to download and execute a secondary payload, a common Emotet tactic.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0
  • 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.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
592af8991900f2f7058dc7ea90a33320ae293c7e541db4222a7b7f9c04f59d96
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8469 bytes