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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 c21516ee7ee1e8bf…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

367.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: b4d3478d96a73bd50cd550862bb7a7e3 SHA-1: 3363cf1ede9cad08e2a48d6f5d5784bb2ba70c54 SHA-256: c21516ee7ee1e8bf79274b153537d66d9866729bad4ea847867fc9708cd7d272
102 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic for Applications T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample is an Excel 4.0 (XLM) spreadsheet containing an Auto_Open macro, indicated by the OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN and OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME heuristics. The SE_ENABLE_LURE heuristic suggests the document prompts the user to enable macros. The extracted URLs likely serve as download locations for secondary payloads. The XLM macros are designed to execute automatically upon opening the document after macros are enabled, leading to the download of further malicious content.

Heuristics 4

  • 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
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — context-specific rules above attribute URLs they actually evaluated; this rule lists URLs that were present in the bytes but were not otherwise tied to a specific finding.
    URL https://silvertoncc.com/ys1Btp80hx/th.html
    • https://christleadersworld.com/1TaIPHnbwbNV/th.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
740337535414e50f998f7a71055f9de0e2208abc42faca490883ba1d9c48deb1
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8349 bytes