Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a24fc9d994a9411d…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

144.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 78572e39d30dbed736385a5ad4d0b091 SHA-1: 2adc4e36e5cc497cc1e9e87e1750d7c1e83faca6 SHA-256: a24fc9d994a9411d8de423c2ba015f044fc2ecc3ccf136b096707ee2f8fcbbcf
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1566.002 Spearphishing Attachment T1059.005 Visual Basic

The file is an Excel spreadsheet containing a Workbook_Open VBA macro. This macro is designed to execute obfuscated PowerShell commands. The PowerShell command reconstructs a complex string that appears to be a multi-stage downloader, attempting to fetch payloads from several URLs. The presence of the 'EmotetExcel' ClamAV signature and the macro's behavior strongly indicate Emotet family activity.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • 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
e5cfab216070fe1e4cc99c114be1118111da457aa00152d1441ffb86ba5a4299
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 8906 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.