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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a3704d2f3af59094…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

83.0 KB Created: 1996-10-14 23:33:28 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 205f3a482321f505a721ad4e57a4de08 SHA-1: 2954e133709bbb1ee79ceac3d1634f267e39cc8c SHA-256: a3704d2f3af59094ea1b446b50bb8062cea9a201bddb6506f63522bc33742eb3
88 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1204.002 Malicious File

The file contains a reference to the CreateProcess API, indicating an attempt to launch an external process. Although no VBA macros were found to be executable, the presence of an embedded URL suggests a potential download and execution vector. The document body contains obfuscated strings and what appears to be a reference to an HTA file, further supporting the likelihood of a malicious payload delivery.

Heuristics 4

  • Reference to CreateProcess API high SC_STR_CREATEPROCESS
    Reference to CreateProcess API
  • OLE document has large unaccounted-for region high OLE_SLACK_ANOMALY
    OLE file is 84,992 bytes but its declared streams total only 42,689 bytes — 42,303 bytes (50%) live in unallocated sector slack. This is the canonical hiding place for pre-macro-era Office exploit payloads (XOR-encoded shellcode reached via a parser pointer-corruption bug in the document structure).
  • VBA project contains no executable statements low OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains a VBA project, but extracted modules only contain attributes/options/comments and no executable statements.
  • 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://investor.msn.com/external/excel/quotes.asp?SYMBOL=[

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
73fe284b1e885bd0405ecb421b1224021163ce4aa3bca30e5a2deb64f9916b3c
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 684 bytes