Emotet — Office (OLE) / .DOCX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8954bc1a8f149a15…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .DOCX

172.8 KB Created: 2020-10-02 08:05:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 19d000d74e8ee766b5e25647df61956a SHA-1: f8ab8673fbd1b5245e2a95de233a74c1fb4739b0 SHA-256: 8954bc1a8f149a15bbbf79b4f0b5c763b60a9f292a587d9810c09db86f884b47
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The sample contains VBA macros, specifically a Document_Open macro that uses CreateObject, indicating an attempt to execute code upon opening. The ClamAV detection explicitly names this as an Emotet downloader variant. The obfuscated document body text is likely part of the lure, but the primary malicious activity is driven by the VBA macro which is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02224-9938637-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02224-9938637-0
  • Document_Open macro high OLE_VBA_DOCOPEN
    Document_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.
  • 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://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7051a023ff8c92545e9437031d326fa9393a821a4be28f0566a57a8f3610dd93
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 10600 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact contains 53 Chr/ChrW string-construction calls. Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.