Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 af680b8e8f9caf30…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 81ee46b4f2b580d3e0b49b9a9de42aad SHA-1: bfae45310b4a9a9300de2c9bcff5e30aa596b964 SHA-256: af680b8e8f9caf302dd810aa69bbdce348666ba702f76f06a37e2c512fb3b640
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1059.005 Visual Basic T1204.002 Malicious File T1071.001 Web Protocols

The critical ClamAV detection and high-severity heuristics for VBA macros, Workbook_Open execution, and CreateObject calls strongly indicate malicious intent. The Workbook_Open macro uses Wscript.Shell to execute a batch file, which in turn appears to download and execute a second-stage payload from a list of URLs. The reconstructed URL string is "http://youlanda.org/eln-image/n8DPZISf/ ,http://roservicebide.net/eln-image/EjdcOMlY8Gy/ ,http://vbaint.com/eln-image/H2pPGtE8XzENc/ ,https://framemakers.us/eln-image/U5W2IGE9m8i9hr/ ,http://niplaw.com/asoLidofunadation ,http://robertfilood.us/eln-image/DGI2YOkwSc9XPO/ ,http://mpmcomputing.com/fonts/JO5/ ,http://robertflood.us/eln-image/DGI2YOkwSc9XPO/". This behavior is characteristic of the Emotet family, which often uses macro-enabled documents to download and install further malware.

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.