Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a3182153bbc02b08…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

142.8 KB Created: 2022-01-19 09:31:16 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 4e3c63eab98759ab8d749ccb75a8ff70 SHA-1: 3a3b2442d81c2c332880df2319b471b63cd1eb7d SHA-256: a3182153bbc02b08e54fa468a6a470ede9822cc612dfd6c8f523b9cb5cd4984e
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The critical heuristics indicate the presence of Excel 4.0 macros with an Auto_Open entry, a known Emotet delivery technique. ClamAV also specifically detected this as an Emotet downloader variant. The macro sheet contains an Auto_Open defined name, suggesting it executes code automatically when the workbook is opened. This is consistent with Emotet's typical behavior of downloading and executing a second-stage payload.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
592af8991900f2f7058dc7ea90a33320ae293c7e541db4222a7b7f9c04f59d96		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8469 bytes

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