Emotet — Office (OLE) / .DOCX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 d3cf19d985ba2396…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .DOCX

178.5 KB Created: 2020-10-26 17:32:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word
MD5: c32aef3ef61053864626e1bbf0c7e0c4 SHA-1: 5f18fec5dd94ba1d47b3014543cd326614e11df1 SHA-256: d3cf19d985ba239666e0baf1a161de4dfc1f49327d23ec569370538e782ceebb
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The critical ClamAV detection and high-severity heuristics for VBA macros, specifically the Document_Open auto-execution and CreateObject calls, strongly indicate a malicious downloader. The presence of a VBA macro in macros.bas, coupled with the auto-execution heuristic, suggests the script is designed to run automatically upon opening the document. This script likely downloads and executes a second-stage payload, consistent with Emotet's known behavior. The document body text appears to be heavily obfuscated or corrupted, providing no clear user-facing lure.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9784039-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Emotet-9784039-0
  • 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
fd86ec2eb619814e7cd62b76d9f6553c2ce07800d98173938893210dd89c469b
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 15663 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.