Emotet — Office (OLE) / .DOCX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9e421a68ace7a8e2…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .DOCX

160.0 KB Created: 2020-09-15 21:35:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 938d7a90716e8c50558814cd6b1ee377 SHA-1: 7cbbfaf50196334a3e903ec83622f434dce3d9ec SHA-256: 9e421a68ace7a8e2fd8e963f6b58f1bbbeeaaa5ceff8b01390316312e6f52cff
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The critical ClamAV detection and high-severity heuristics for VBA macros, specifically the Document_Open auto-execution and CreateObject calls, strongly indicate malicious intent. The presence of a VBA macro file named 'macros.bas' further supports this. The embedded document body text, though heavily corrupted, contains what appears to be obfuscated PowerShell or VBA code, likely intended to download and execute a second-stage payload. The Emotet family is a common deliverer of such payloads.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Malware.Emotet-9762290-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Malware.Emotet-9762290-0
  • 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
48aeeefcb5ab39bdc7a9844f7217739e7dc8c9cb3f8a901965d3ff17ec851125
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 25311 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.