Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 a5d9b4e0d9fb15c3…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 3a270107f14069e7c6b4bf48e7a2538e SHA-1: cc6678fee8ca649727cc543e0af212812f103a72 SHA-256: a5d9b4e0d9fb15c3cc250228f172c269895c1bf94509d7db11b5eec9211de5e1
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1059.001 PowerShell T1204.002 Malicious File

The file contains VBA macros, specifically a Workbook_Open subroutine, which is a common technique for Emotet. The macro attempts to execute a VBScript payload from 'c:\programdata\tjspowj.vbs' and a batch file from 'c:\programdata\uidpjewl.bat'. The batch file contains obfuscated commands that appear to download and execute additional stages from multiple URLs. The presence of 'CreateObject' and references to 'Wscript.Shell' further indicate script execution capabilities. The ClamAV detection as 'Xls.Downloader.Emotet' strongly supports this family attribution.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Downloader.Emotet-ab81c42b2bd4747e-9951196-0
  • 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
faf50200d5a9adeeda00cc1da1bbf8f6abf0317a1e97a58db8ae804ba12ba446		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 13985 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.

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