Emotet — Office (OLE) malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9125706ef9bf6b56…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE)

157.5 KB Created: 2020-09-15 13:42:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 07541823190d022e1a1136ded8f06fa3 SHA-1: 83c4da7f699f80abb815c25677585e891a60a1ff SHA-256: 9125706ef9bf6b56ee381a86a48c2c6db5aca9a2ccf49ec1ccb2682c3257966b
300 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1027 Obfuscated Files or Information

The sample is a malicious Office document containing obfuscated VBA macros. A critical heuristic identified an OLE_USERFORM_OBFUSCATED_POWERSHELL, indicating a PowerShell stager. The Document_Open macro is present and uses CreateObject, suggesting it's designed to execute automatically. The ClamAV detection and heuristic firings strongly suggest the Emotet family. The obfuscated PowerShell command appears to be a stager designed to download and execute a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 8

  • Hidden UserForm PowerShell EncodedCommand stager critical OLE_USERFORM_OBFUSCATED_POWERSHELL
    OLE document contains a UTF-16LE form/property string with an obfuscated PowerShell -EncodedCommand payload. The observed macro family reconstructs this hidden string with Split/Join or UserForm property reads and launches it through WMI/COM process creation. This is downloader malware, not an Office CVE exploit.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Malware.Emotet-9762371-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Malware.Emotet-9762371-0
  • 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
8bee8f90d9dfb3891c7c232e7baf01a2aaa2db95a501fe4ff2d320babae29389
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 22935 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.