Emotet — Office (OLE) / .DOCX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 c73bf58d65e3930c…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .DOCX

171.0 KB Created: 2020-10-21 13:56:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: c8306a7fe41e73613150395a1af62f3c SHA-1: 3eb286ed7c98c2b7783bdf589f30c4b0d5a28be4 SHA-256: c73bf58d65e3930c85d4747f84f5bd1d4cb02c817eb7e42535c640dbf71a3967
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell T1204.002 Malicious File

The critical ClamAV detection and high-severity heuristics for VBA macros, specifically the Document_Open auto-execution and CreateObject calls, strongly indicate malicious intent. The presence of a VBA macro named 'macros.bas' further supports this. The ClamAV signature 'Doc.Dropper.EmotetUpdate1020-9778523-0' points to the Emotet family, known for its dropper capabilities. The document body content is heavily obfuscated and appears to be encoded, likely to hide its true purpose, but the macro execution is the primary indicator of compromise.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Dropper.EmotetUpdate1020-9778523-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Dropper.EmotetUpdate1020-9778523-0
  • 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
113d36c64715b3a3694b52821b832bd3a24df7013a1eebeaaceb4571875cbc4c
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 23319 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.