Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 aaec559a9461b2ce…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

70.6 KB Created: 2022-01-20 19:00:43 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: f1fe8e935ff0013ca48fd220e02193da SHA-1: c4b1cfa48e121b674b60e71aeabe12521691c6f4 SHA-256: aaec559a9461b2ceb6da5a557186641e67370e83fddc9b23237f6f92c0e22fc3
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell

The critical heuristic firings indicate the presence of Excel 4.0 macros, specifically an Auto_Open entry, which is a strong indicator of malicious intent. ClamAV detection further confirms this, identifying the file as 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9937164-0'. This type of macro is commonly used by Emotet to download and execute additional malicious payloads.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9937164-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9937164-0
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
7f1f89a8b36a750dced08313a4e4f056192a6eac7194357c673dbbd2670a1a18		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 4219 bytes

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