Emotet — Office (OLE) malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 7c19eb4eb7d7fb6d…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE)

230.3 KB Created: 2020-08-14 23:47:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 4a72bbe58aea9392eee1b995106e27b2 SHA-1: c3927cd1283c370ca9f7f97ce2d415e87ee36f4e SHA-256: 7c19eb4eb7d7fb6df0535b28d91ee0aa1af6d3a7c3d6c11373dea6a2655da8c4
262 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The sample contains VBA macros, including a Document_Open macro, which is a common technique for Emotet. The critical heuristic 'OLE_VBA_USERFORM_HIDDEN_COMMAND_STAGER' indicates a hidden command stager within a UserForm, suggesting the macro is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload. ClamAV detection further confirms its malicious nature and identifies it as Emotet.

Heuristics 7

  • VBA UserForm hidden-property command stager critical OLE_VBA_USERFORM_HIDDEN_COMMAND_STAGER
    VBA auto-exec macro creates a COM object from a decoded variable and reconstructs command text through Split/Join and hidden UserForm properties such as ControlTipText, Tag, Pages, or HelpContextId. This is a high-confidence macro downloader/loader shape seen in the reviewed OLE set, but it is not an Office CVE exploit primitive.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9349720-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9349720-0
  • Document_Open macro high OLE_VBA_DOCOPEN
    Document_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://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
c9e222625209724b824cd241f8d136260a3fd5171cd978940b3d275289318aae
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 8071 bytes