Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 b35dde36cfaacdaf…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

129.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 80015bd4ca79211d58cd1868af1f0db7 SHA-1: 128c7106e6badac9601845d13a0b42de4b4c5cc0 SHA-256: b35dde36cfaacdaf74aeb9487a334acf0f62e97f69f1524759cdf50864b4f951
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 90%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1204.002 Malicious File T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The sample contains VBA macros that leverage Wscript.Shell to execute obfuscated commands. Specifically, it attempts to run a VBS file and a BAT file from the 'c:\programdata' directory. The VBA code also reconstructs a complex URL string containing multiple potential download sources, indicating an attempt to download and execute a second-stage payload. The presence of 'CreateObject' and 'Workbook_Open' triggers, along with the ClamAV detection of 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02220-9938909-0', strongly suggests Emotet family activity.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02220-9938909-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetRed02220-9938909-0
  • 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
7a075e02dc1e88807280b9b84946715e79a3c091d50391301434649c77b78ea1
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 12808 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.