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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a2459fb938603f08…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

380.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 2192a26e5c678ea4f48083fe22375ec3 SHA-1: e63ee3d60a58b3077ad41a12a7ffb0dd6767c6fa SHA-256: a2459fb938603f081b12d01380341c9aaa6a2c4481e1f7bb6068f108a5ef7ea4
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) macro-enabled spreadsheet that contains an Auto_Open macro, indicating it will execute automatically upon opening. It also contains a lure to enable macros, a common technique for malware delivery. The extracted URLs are likely used to download a second-stage payload. The XLM macros appear to be attempting to download and execute a file.

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 — context-specific rules above attribute URLs they actually evaluated; this rule lists URLs that were present in the bytes but were not otherwise tied to a specific finding.
    URL https://hermescomm.net/x9NvrhL0/lena.html
    • https://asistenciajuridicaintegral.com/6YiCkNix5/lena.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
be629cb484f8d82e38c4234ddbad4f1755e762b9c1c8359642d99f8c77e6e858
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8812 bytes