Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9e2c8544aae45502…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 80d58d21cef1c67516a3406797a6df29 SHA-1: acc826c5973e0201f302149e4c63050f98c54a5a SHA-256: 9e2c8544aae45502c6c6e8e5a65dd4f4fdfa32c232268b46449b8ed7d0973b05
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The file contains VBA macros that are automatically executed upon opening the workbook, as indicated by the Workbook_Open heuristic. The script leverages CreateObject to interact with Wscript.Shell and RDS.DataSpace, and it constructs a batch file at 'c:\programdata\uidpjewl.bat'. This batch file contains a heavily obfuscated PowerShell command that attempts to download payloads from multiple URLs. The presence of 'Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0' in the ClamAV detection strongly suggests the Emotet family, known for its downloader capabilities.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0
  • Reference to Windows Script Host high SC_STR_WSCRIPT
    Reference to Windows Script Host
  • Workbook_Open macro high OLE_VBA_WBOPEN
    Workbook_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

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
faf50200d5a9adeeda00cc1da1bbf8f6abf0317a1e97a58db8ae804ba12ba446
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 13985 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.