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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 aabc4f1efe7b9ee8…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

367.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 90a2c96c38e9734ee34953c113aecc29 SHA-1: 8eb2b5bebf4227317eeda623965bc3a9a6774f38 SHA-256: aabc4f1efe7b9ee8c153c0a9dfc6e46b9f45f39056861c388d2742bc960671c4
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, which is designed to execute automatically upon opening the spreadsheet. The SE_ENABLE_LURE heuristic suggests the document prompts the user to enable macros, a common social engineering tactic. The embedded URLs likely serve as download locations for further stages of the attack. The XLM macro sheet itself is the primary mechanism for executing the initial 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 — 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://silvertoncc.com/ys1Btp80hx/th.html
    • https://christleadersworld.com/1TaIPHnbwbNV/th.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
740337535414e50f998f7a71055f9de0e2208abc42faca490883ba1d9c48deb1
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8349 bytes