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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8996dd852306a68d…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

380.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: b008833bc338bd9942380b32f2f9d074 SHA-1: 60c3d4d880450e844e6e89b8be027ca710114f92 SHA-256: 8996dd852306a68d3aa9ec446c685999f8abea960a28dc0e8fe32934f2601429
102 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic for Applications T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample is an Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro-enabled spreadsheet. It contains an Auto_Open macro, indicating it will execute automatically when the file is opened. The document body contains embedded URLs and text that appears to be part of the macro code, including calls to 'downloadFile' and 'runDll'. This suggests the macro is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from one of the provided URLs.

Heuristics 4

  • Excel 4.0 Auto_Open defined name critical OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME
    oletools recovered an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry from an Excel 4.0 macro sheet. The raw BIFF name can be tokenized or partially opaque to byte-string checks, but the recovered macro listing confirms the workbook has an XLM auto-execution entry.
  • Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro sheet present medium OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN
    Workbook contains an Excel 4.0 macro sheet sub-stream — XLM is rarely seen in modern legitimate workbooks and was a major Office malware vector during 2020-2022.
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — context-specific rules above attribute URLs they actually evaluated; this rule lists URLs that were present in the bytes but were not otherwise tied to a specific finding.
    URL https://hermescomm.net/x9NvrhL0/lena.html
    • https://asistenciajuridicaintegral.com/6YiCkNix5/lena.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
be629cb484f8d82e38c4234ddbad4f1755e762b9c1c8359642d99f8c77e6e858
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8812 bytes