Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9abfbf0690005367…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

142.1 KB Created: 2022-01-19 09:31:16 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: bd33e94b6a8514eadf52f5d4eca7b5f5 SHA-1: 2a51fc25a21d1a9b600b13f73757a0f8abdb5b0b SHA-256: 9abfbf06900053672f9e159b4c57db0807dc5a3d5816702f17c5b07fe83370d0
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The critical heuristics indicate the presence of an Excel 4.0 macro sheet with an Auto_Open defined name, a common technique for Emotet. ClamAV also specifically detected this file as 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0'. The macro sheet itself appears to be designed to execute automatically upon opening, suggesting it's intended to download and execute a second-stage payload.

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.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0
  • 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.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
592af8991900f2f7058dc7ea90a33320ae293c7e541db4222a7b7f9c04f59d96		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8469 bytes

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