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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 9fd003b1e3260666…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

367.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: a4b74c385297c830c03761a0830dd278 SHA-1: 699e8dd5d9d2c414203ccc82dde67e32e7c67e53 SHA-256: 9fd003b1e3260666c79cc6b62ab7e02f446dccbc34ec42d6ef6cac25ed00e386
102 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic for Applications T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample is an Excel 4.0 (XLM) spreadsheet containing an Auto_Open macro, indicated by the OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN and OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME heuristics. The document body and heuristics confirm a lure is used to prompt the user to enable macros. The XLM macros are designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from one of the two embedded URLs. The SE_ENABLE_LURE heuristic further supports the social engineering aspect of this attack.

Heuristics 4

  • 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
  • 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 https://smartpalakatva.com/edQsUZOLlE/th.html
    • https://pilstlcommodities.com/Ov4FlB3lpy/th.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
e61304013e31eadd8bf35fc5d3e6cbadd61463966f2a2d09ae24f65eb0ee3106
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8349 bytes