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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 858963fa777ab0af…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

369.0 KB Created: 2018-12-06 20:43:11 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-11-27
MD5: f5a8b72709235c68196a397174152660 SHA-1: ab863a70358f150e3f0da53c330f7226d46037f4 SHA-256: 858963fa777ab0af515f7a81ff5ce29ffdda5361c67137cf0be35095bc7f1d9b
360 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The critical heuristic firings for Shell() calls and WScript.Shell usage, combined with the VBA macro downloading and saving a file to disk, strongly indicate a downloader. The Workbook_Open auto-execution further suggests an attempt to run the payload immediately upon opening the malicious Excel file. The obfuscated script content prevents a more detailed analysis of the payload's specific actions.

Heuristics 8

  • Shell() call in VBA critical OLE_VBA_SHELL
    Shell() call in VBA
  • WScript.Shell usage critical OLE_VBA_WSCRIPT
    WScript.Shell usage
  • VBA downloads and writes a file to disk critical OLE_VBA_HTTP_DROP_EXEC
    VBA reads an HTTP response body and writes it to disk (ADODB.Stream SaveToFile). Combined with the auto-exec/Shell paths this is a download-drop dropper even when the COM ProgIDs are built dynamically to evade keyword scanning.
  • Reference to Windows Script Host high SC_STR_WSCRIPT
    Reference to Windows Script Host
  • Workbook_Open macro high OLE_VBA_WBOPEN
    Workbook_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

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
160d3745c2369c875b2c109d40b1fdf837e447dd6b160041597b9e5590bfe65e		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 12674 bytes

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