Emotet Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis — malicious · 8ad6d03203b90348

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

74.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-06-20

MD5: 5316c7769ef0dc54878c1a23bb551e64 SHA-1: 27fc40728158c316d6a1285ad79e01ae99d76edc SHA-256: 8ad6d03203b903483b28c713a03c225af26a17accfb083ff4e378855fcec5d18

200 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK

T1059.005 Visual Basic T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample is an Excel 4.0 macro-enabled spreadsheet. Heuristics indicate the presence of an Auto_Open macro that uses dangerous functions, specifically the RUN function. The extracted URLs are highly suspicious and likely serve as download locations for a secondary payload. ClamAV detection confirms this is Emotet, a known downloader.

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.
XLM Auto_Open with dangerous formula APIs critical OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN

Excel 4.0 macro sheet contains an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry and dangerous XLM formula APIs that can invoke programs, write files, or transfer control without VBA.
ClamAV: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ea81817e7f807ab1-9952142-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION

ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ea81817e7f807ab1-9952142-0
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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

Filename	Kind	Source	Size
`xlm_macros.txt` `7ab5ef6689937532951c996fe211a2ac046a3dbc546728bfe725212729605929`	xlm-macro	oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing)	6790 bytes

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