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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a4cf5e50c5e39b62…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

380.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: f8279732a5cebb0e3d35b376dba1ee96 SHA-1: 1a95810bf9cd5f125e050d83a85e152d9f22f29b SHA-256: a4cf5e50c5e39b62e82b9303def94f8d6207db1206cba353d8f0e100b4d497f6
102 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic for Applications T1204.002 Malicious File

The critical heuristic OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME indicates the presence of an Excel 4.0 Auto_Open macro. The SE_ENABLE_LURE heuristic suggests the document prompts the user to enable macros. The embedded URLs likely serve as download locations for a second-stage payload. The XLM macros themselves contain calls to functions like CALL, RUN, and DOWNLOADFILE, further supporting the payload delivery hypothesis.

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://thedeformo.com/zrbLAqMKy21Y/lena.html
    • https://faithfulroofingco.com/nmsY1dCNaBRO/lena.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
13ea4a1fd330f9266fa91027043baa61f334e3ac691e10ce14b7c7fee97c551c
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8812 bytes