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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a4837805e17d36a6…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

367.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 72a4d9944c43e06111c6b1636ee4994c SHA-1: bf8f344888e0a37eec7c8803a6092438425429a4 SHA-256: a4837805e17d36a63a9226516ced66f95254bfa5406c078db3ab580e413026ab
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 macro-enabled spreadsheet that uses an Auto_Open macro to execute. The document body contains a lure instructing the user to enable macros, and the extracted macro code attempts to download a payload from two URLs: https://smartpalakatva.com/edQsUZOLlE/th.html and https://pilstlcommodities.com/Ov4FlB3lpy/th.html. The macro logic appears to be designed to download and execute a second-stage payload.

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