Emotet — Office (OLE) / .DOCX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 aec70c8b5a7b8868…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .DOCX

169.8 KB Created: 2020-10-20 06:24:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 4a1bccf747ca6fb8b1282d248a288ad4 SHA-1: c1a16c0e65bb1c7542b95674a1bff57bc90aecdd SHA-256: aec70c8b5a7b8868a095ff2fb70741ad4fb204eeaf4b64d0c3663979d867753f
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The critical ClamAV detection and high-severity heuristics for VBA macros, specifically the Document_Open auto-execution and CreateObject calls, strongly indicate malicious intent. The presence of a VBA macro in the 'macros.bas' file, combined with the 'OLE_VBA_PCODE_AUTOEXEC_EXEC' firing, suggests the macro is designed to execute a second-stage payload. The Emotet family is known for using such techniques to download and run further malware. The document body content is heavily obfuscated and does not provide clear user-facing text.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9780995-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9780995-0
  • Document_Open macro high OLE_VBA_DOCOPEN
    Document_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
  • 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 http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
9c144e4934aa06f4a846d3460cf32982827c1cabf227410ae75b7d2e86969ea7
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 17539 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.