Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 861cae65e16818f4…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

133.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: b28b5754cc1754e46ada156722b91354 SHA-1: bc17cb21187bdf86fae84d9f58a60c473d77be0a SHA-256: 861cae65e16818f4213c88c0ea033f03abaab598624853ae3e3604f7d1cdd80d
340 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell T1204.002 Malicious File

The file contains heavily obfuscated VBA macros designed to execute malicious code. It leverages CreateObject to instantiate Wscript.Shell and RDS.DataSpace, and references PowerShell, indicating a downloader functionality. The Workbook_Open event triggers the execution of this loader, which attempts to download and run a second-stage payload from a list of URLs. The ClamAV signature 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0' strongly suggests the Emotet family.

Heuristics 8

  • Obfuscated auto-exec VBA loader critical OLE_VBA_OBFUSCATED_AUTOEXEC_LOADER
    Auto-exec VBA reconstructs strings with a heavy custom decoder (numeric char-array, repeated hex-string decode, or junk-token Replace removal) and feeds them to a COM-instantiation or execution sink. This obfuscated-loader shape keeps CreateObject/Shell/URL indicators out of the macro source.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • Reference to PowerShell high SC_STR_POWERSHELL
    Reference to PowerShell
  • 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
2371f091b169c7918c945b8974b3f60437212f84d1a9d429701826689481f8d8		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 6376 bytes

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