Qbot — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 cf15c8462ef4fb77…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

126.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: df280179a25b910d9a68f66f28267b71 SHA-1: 9b15f70b8589d7e826f2253f37a5d7378d372988 SHA-256: cf15c8462ef4fb776c83057fa7f517d4ecc04f8c12da80eb818ab6ffbf9b52bc
262 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Qbot · confidence 95%

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

The sample is an Excel 4.0 macro-enabled workbook. Critical heuristics indicate the presence of an Auto_Open macro that uses dangerous functions, specifically the RUN function, and reconstructs URLs from cell arrays. The reconstructed URLs are "https://mooval.com.au/7Z3pMk3Ss/r.html", "https://rayomobility.com/bsFjdVpoT/r.html", and "https://allpianotiles.com/ntmtBkrN/r.html". This strongly suggests the macro is designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from these locations, consistent with Qbot downloader behavior.

Heuristics 6

  • 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.
  • XLM Auto_Open with dangerous formula APIs critical 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.
  • URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (3 URLs) critical OLE_XLM_CELL_ARRAY_URL
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet stages its payload URL across the BIFF8 Shared String Table (one quoted-char SST entry concatenated with & at runtime) or across individual numeric cells (one ASCII charcode per cell). The reconstructed URL is invisible to literal-bytes URL extraction because it is never contiguous in the workbook stream. URLs were recovered by walking the BIFF8 record stream and decoding SST entries plus LABELSST/RK/NUMBER cells.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Qbot12212-9916031-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Qbot12212-9916031-0
  • 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.
  • 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://mooval.com.au/7Z3pMk3Ss/r.html
    • https://rayomobility.com/bsFjdVpoT/r.html
    • https://allpianotuner.com/ntmtBkrN/r.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
a2382cb943fb6a31fd52301a5f013ec5ef0f32a441668a334c00171e0cd868b6		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 11569 bytes

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.