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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 caf91957a1c278b0…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

426.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 07f0968dee099e6a6a5b29d63aea5dd2 SHA-1: 6b9d1d942c8977262562b91085129124e4e35da1 SHA-256: caf91957a1c278b0e772d28d71d5fe4a71a964434249c5afd0178d1cab7515ec
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.004 Scripting: PowerShell T1204 User Execution T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter

The sample is an Excel file containing both XLM and VBA macros. The presence of a Workbook_Open macro and heuristics indicating a lure to enable macros suggest that the document is designed to trick the user into executing malicious code. The XLM macro sheet contains dangerous functions like RUN, and the VBA macros likely leverage ShellExecute and URLDownloadToFile APIs to download and execute a second-stage payload from the embedded URL. The URL https://mueblesmaple.com.mx/19.gif is the most suspicious IOC.

Heuristics 8

  • Reference to URLDownloadToFile API critical SC_STR_URLDOWNLOAD
    Reference to URLDownloadToFile API
  • Reference to ShellExecute API high SC_STR_SHELLEXEC
    Reference to ShellExecute API
  • XLM Auto_Open with dangerous formula APIs high OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet contains an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry and dangerous XLM formula APIs that can invoke programs, write files, or transfer control without VBA.
  • Workbook_Open macro high OLE_VBA_WBOPEN
    Workbook_Open macro
  • 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.
  • VBA macros detected medium OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains VBA macro code
  • 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 — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL https://mueblesmaple.com.mx/19.gif�
    • https://mueblesmaple.com.mx/19.gif
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/
    • http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceRef#
    • http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/

Extracted artifacts 2

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
e26e570691e37538cb153a294d4bd7899ebc79f39ec63fd34cf1eae37efa26f6		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 9455 bytes
macros.bas
8c21c322bb8b23e7dbfa4da0de1c41676162b0810e96582d1365413c12adc768		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 977 bytes

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