Emotet — Office (OLE) / .DOCX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 cef936ee53c8e933…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .DOCX

171.0 KB Created: 2020-10-21 13:56:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: 40ac4644537e3c930f45d24b8991793f SHA-1: ba76396d753bebb600fb32d4ce19a5ffe2313244 SHA-256: cef936ee53c8e9333c3c499878b39e33d50a8e39f1674c63bdb34ac04ba01630
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1059.001 PowerShell

The file is identified as malicious by ClamAV with the signature 'Doc.Dropper.EmotetUpdate1020-9778523-0', strongly suggesting an Emotet variant. The presence of a Document_Open VBA macro that uses CreateObject and p-code execution confirms the macro's intent to execute arbitrary code. This macro is likely responsible for downloading and executing a second-stage payload, a common Emotet behavior.

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.