Malicious Office (OLE) / .XLS — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 7da2e53a66d3721a…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

331.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: f114c2de5d67b73935ddb80c4b2fb73f SHA-1: bc5429f735666fb8d98ae9df01ab6874a4e620c9 SHA-256: 7da2e53a66d3721ae178a9cf57d179d020a561e604420f21f1b818787bf2cb0c
302 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is an Excel 4.0 macro-enabled workbook that contains an Auto_Open macro. This macro is designed to execute a series of commands, including constructing strings like 'Kel32' and 'CryA', and ultimately calls ShellExecute via the CALL function to download and execute a payload from the URL https://bgms.co.in/ds/261120.gif. The presence of the Auto_Open macro and the use of dangerous functions like RUN and EXEC indicate a downloader functionality.

Heuristics 7

  • 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.
  • URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (1 URL) critical OLE_XLM_CELL_ARRAY_URL
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet stages its payload URL across the BIFF8 Shared String Table (one quoted-char SST entry concatenated with & at runtime), across individual numeric cells (one ASCII charcode per cell), or split across multi-char fragment cells a download formula concatenates by reference (=A1&A2&… / CONCATENATE(...)). The reconstructed URL is invisible to literal-bytes URL extraction because it is never contiguous in the workbook stream. URLs were recovered by walking the BIFF8 record stream and decoding SST entries, LABELSST/RK/NUMBER cells, and FORMULA cell-reference concatenation in token order.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Docusign0521-9864805-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Docusign0521-9864805-0
  • Reference to ShellExecute API high SC_STR_SHELLEXEC
    Reference to ShellExecute API
  • 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.
  • 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://bgms.co.in/ds/261120.gif
    • https://bgms.co.in/ds/261120.gif�

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
e213645668ce9f5d68f4226afb5b9b5e6c2ad49807658d9b833212b471c7c00d
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 6675 bytes