Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b21189d912951e92…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

121.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: f3936f8e607768f0be3113f8eacbcb02 SHA-1: 2d8c84e2d4784d9c780dfc0ba507f5d16c6a18ce SHA-256: b21189d912951e92da7cb7d2f5194d03b9f13a7038f90efba0e258377e3ecf70
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The sample contains a Workbook_Open VBA macro that is triggered upon opening the Excel file. This macro utilizes CreateObject to interact with Wscript.Shell, indicating an attempt to execute commands or scripts. The macro also contains obfuscated strings that reconstruct a list of URLs, likely for downloading a second-stage payload. The presence of a .bat file and .vbs file in the document body further suggests a downloader or dropper functionality. The ClamAV detection explicitly names this as an Emotet variant.

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.

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.