MuddyWater — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 7de663524b63b865…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.36 MB Created: 2019-11-20 15:27:56 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-03-15
MD5: df648ccd3b842ce0128318629b5cbd0d SHA-1: eae3b67508ac5df766609f1630b615c0110cd6fe SHA-256: 7de663524b63b865e57ffc3eb4a339e150258583fdee6c2c2ca4dd7b5ed9dfe7
322 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MuddyWater · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell T1204.002 Malicious File T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The critical ClamAV detection and high-severity heuristics for OLE VBA macros, Workbook_Open execution, CreateObject, GetObject, and CallByName indicate a malicious macro-enabled Excel file. The script attempts to download and execute a second-stage payload, as evidenced by the CreateObject and CallByName calls, and the file is detected as Xls.Dropper.MuddyWater. The embedded URLs are benign and likely unrelated to the malicious functionality.

Heuristics 9

  • ClamAV: Xls.Dropper.MuddyWater-9940179-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Dropper.MuddyWater-9940179-0
  • Workbook_Open macro high OLE_VBA_WBOPEN
    Workbook_Open macro
  • CreateObject call high OLE_VBA_CREATEOBJ
    CreateObject call
  • GetObject call high OLE_VBA_GETOBJ
    GetObject call
  • CallByName call high OLE_VBA_CALLBYNAME
    CallByName 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.
  • Suspicious extracted artifact high EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE
    One or more files extracted from inside this sample matched static suspicious-content checks such as script obfuscation, encoded payload blobs, packed data, or execution/download terms.
  • 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://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceRef#

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
2dfe6494a39f0aaf8aeccd6252c22b8ec17a2aa9e6d778308c8d6ef79c961e28		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 4157 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.

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