Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 8f4acb70fa910e20…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

56.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-03-29
MD5: 75e09d2885e41d6f9e5d3d6afee19a48 SHA-1: 8de7baa19632d20d14d244559d9f7033f28511a1 SHA-256: 8f4acb70fa910e2007fce439c1740a2d1ca543be53bd297395dc4a64607beea9
262 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Service Execution: Service Execution T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious File

The file is an Excel 4.0 macro-enabled workbook containing an Auto_Open macro. This macro is designed to execute 'regsvr32.exe' and download a second-stage payload from one of the six embedded URLs. The ClamAV detection and heuristic firings strongly indicate this is a downloader, consistent with the Emotet family.

Heuristics 6

  • 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.
  • URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (6 URLs) critical OLE_XLM_CELL_ARRAY_URL
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet stages its payload URL across the BIFF8 Shared String Table (one quoted-char SST entry concatenated with & at runtime) or across individual numeric cells (one ASCII charcode per cell). The reconstructed URL is invisible to literal-bytes URL extraction because it is never contiguous in the workbook stream. URLs were recovered by walking the BIFF8 record stream and decoding SST entries plus LABELSST/RK/NUMBER cells.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Emotet03220-9942564-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Emotet03220-9942564-0
  • 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.
  • 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://dharian.org/_sharedtemplates/D3QgytUZsO7korYQrG/
    • http://digitalripple.com/scripts/4ovLPfq/
    • http://www.construlandia.com/templates/BrRf8QDloUqNyTAdXE/
    • https://dembek.co.za/sass/30C/
    • http://portrettenbeeld.nl/layouts/sfGsF/
    • http://www.die13weizen.at/error/aM099L/

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
5834970f734bf661b309120f05c0862d1e7420175d65222097e2d0e18d98d2e0		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 6614 bytes

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