Malicious Office (OOXML) / .XLSX — malware analysis report

Heuristics 4

• Excel 4.0 macro sheet (1 sheet(s)) critical 2 related findings OOXML_XLM_MACROSHEET
  Spreadsheet contains an Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro sheet — XLM was a major Office malware vector during 2020-2022 and evaded many VBA-focused controls before Microsoft tightened XLM defaults. Even legitimate XLM use is rare in modern workbooks. The macro sheet is stored as XLSB/BIFF12 binary content, which many XML-only OOXML scanners miss.
• Binary XLM macro sheet with WinAPI/download strings critical OOXML_XLM_BINARY_WINAPI_STRINGS
  Excel 4.0 macro sheet is stored as BIFF12/XLSB binary data and contains Win32 download or process-execution API strings such as URLDownloadToFileA, ShellExecuteA, or CreateDirectoryA. These strings are high-signal in XLM macro sheets and catch payload-download macros that XML-formula scanners cannot parse.
• URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (1 URL) critical OOXML_XLM_CELL_ARRAY_URL
  Excel 4.0 macro sheet stages its payload URL across individual numeric cells (one ASCII charcode per cell), inside an embedded HTA that uses VBScript Chr()/&-concat obfuscation, 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 BIFF12 record stream of every worksheet and macrosheet part and decoding RK/inline-string/shared-string cells in row-major and column-major order plus FORMULA cell-reference concatenation in token order.
• 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://live-now.club/ds/29.gif Referenced by macro

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