Emotet — Office (OLE) / .DOCX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 afe621cd44cd6892…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .DOCX

169.7 KB Created: 2020-09-29 12:31:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: f1ec5173e1aba14928c4d865b369d447 SHA-1: 34972470e898e2490a9849d89659e9809f55da16 SHA-256: afe621cd44cd689287ad44e9d1728558887078487d74729709bf5e332f7f99d2
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The file is a malicious Office document containing VBA macros, specifically triggering a Document_Open macro that uses CreateObject. This is strongly indicative of a downloader, as confirmed by ClamAV's detection signature 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02224-9938637-0'. The macro's auto-execution and use of CreateObject suggest it attempts to download and execute a second-stage payload. The document body content appears to be obfuscated or corrupted, providing no direct user-facing lure.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02224-9938637-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02224-9938637-0
  • 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
78af9bfbd851f0765d951c5fd87890712e4afc03034fdc1be9f16082b41d9b12
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 8150 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.