Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 d381cabf534a949f…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

88.5 KB Created: 2022-02-14 05:58:53 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-02-22
MD5: d2a67c3c6e653188c308c1cac3afcc59 SHA-1: 9bb92cc080fe817a2f5d7951bc4142ba36712a3a SHA-256: d381cabf534a949f018d01e5a157d2ac751dc5729e761371ac3fc00f1bd69cde
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1204.002 Malicious File

The sample is an Excel file containing VBA macros, specifically a Workbook_Open auto-execution macro. This macro is designed to create and execute a VBScript file named 'bbiwjdf.vbs' in the 'c:\programdata\' directory. The VBScript itself is heavily obfuscated but appears to reconstruct a PowerShell command that downloads a second-stage payload from a hardcoded URL and saves it as 'oiphilfj.dll' in 'c:\programdata\'. The ClamAV signature 'Doc.Downloader.Emotet02220-9940037-0' strongly suggests an Emotet family attribution.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Emotet02220-9940037-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Emotet02220-9940037-0
  • 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
98ce64e756a4ee3d4f776c1541f7f3ad0f966d786db88eda74f9a833f3a74b83
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 11705 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.