Emotet — Office (OLE) malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 bb78bbd9043ef0ab…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE)

231.4 KB Created: 2020-08-14 23:47:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 1e7f6d57a308e913fee40145d906ca88 SHA-1: f61776c58dbd375c224035aa4c9cb2aafcb97a98 SHA-256: bb78bbd9043ef0abe47543baaec5e7c226a843557292f45b50a500291f5adfbb
300 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell T1204.002 Malicious File T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The file is identified as malicious by ClamAV with the signature Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9349720-0. Critical heuristics indicate a VBA UserForm hidden-property command stager, which is a known technique for executing code. The Document_Open macro and CreateObject calls further support this, suggesting the VBA code is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload. The presence of a VBA macro and the Emotet family attribution strongly indicate a downloader attack pattern.

Heuristics 8

  • VBA UserForm hidden-property command stager critical OLE_VBA_USERFORM_HIDDEN_COMMAND_STAGER
    VBA auto-exec macro creates a COM object from a decoded variable and reconstructs command text through Split/Join and hidden UserForm properties such as ControlTipText, Tag, Pages, or HelpContextId. This is a high-confidence macro downloader/loader shape seen in the reviewed OLE set, but it is not an Office CVE exploit primitive.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9349720-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9349720-0
  • 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
c9e222625209724b824cd241f8d136260a3fd5171cd978940b3d275289318aae
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 8071 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.