Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 cdf0a7b48320e864…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

151.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 66610e1b6fa2a1f2717ba5d624f144a4 SHA-1: aaa60d3ebea865f6428f531093c1bd80ac7c37a2 SHA-256: cdf0a7b48320e8645ae0ca23e583b1f8399f030a6f85d707acbe141096939ac1
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The sample is an Excel file containing VBA macros, specifically a Workbook_Open macro that executes a shell command. This macro is designed to download and run a batch file from a hardcoded path, which in turn appears to download and execute a second-stage payload from a list of URLs. The presence of Wscript.Shell and CreateObject calls, along with the ClamAV detection name 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0', strongly suggests Emotet activity.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • Reference to Windows Script Host high SC_STR_WSCRIPT
    Reference to Windows Script Host
  • Workbook_Open macro high OLE_VBA_WBOPEN
    Workbook_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

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
c49f2df77c50e10269216d97c3efdf7c32f9f18ba5d8fd42a9b144f48e100040
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 5709 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.