Emotet — Office (OLE) malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 d7b1d94a9406be03…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE)

81.1 KB Created: 2018-11-05 22:29:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Office Word First seen: 2019-01-20
MD5: ee6f37cbbe592d80c356b1898579c67e SHA-1: f4444a1fc0cc613d816e49816bdf1188f5cc0f67 SHA-256: d7b1d94a9406be03e63a24f859939f2a7b6a13b1e8fb4388b792518e7622aff1
190 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment

The sample contains heavily obfuscated PowerShell commands within the document body, designed to download and execute a second-stage payload. The heuristic firings, including references to PowerShell and command execution, along with the ClamAV detection for 'Doc.Dropper.Emotet-6769504-0', strongly indicate this is a dropper for the Emotet banking trojan. The embedded PowerShell command reconstructs to a complex string that decodes and executes further malicious code.

Heuristics 6

  • ClamAV: Doc.Dropper.Emotet-6769504-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Dropper.Emotet-6769504-0
  • Reference to PowerShell high SC_STR_POWERSHELL
    Reference to PowerShell
  • OLE document has large unaccounted-for region high OLE_SLACK_ANOMALY
    OLE file is 83,072 bytes but its declared streams total only 48,160 bytes — 34,912 bytes (42%) live in unallocated sector slack. This is the canonical hiding place for pre-macro-era Office exploit payloads (XOR-encoded shellcode reached via a parser pointer-corruption bug in the document structure).
  • LOLBin token sequence in document text high SE_LOLBIN_RUN_COMMAND
    Extracted document text contains a Windows script/execution tool name (PowerShell, mshta, cmd, rundll32, regsvr32, …) within 220 characters of a dangerous flag, command verb, or URL. This is a visible 'run this' instruction in HTML/PDF/RTF lure bodies, or — in macro-laden Office files — the macro's own string-pool entries appearing adjacent in extracted text.
  • VBA project contains no executable statements low OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains a VBA project, but extracted modules only contain attributes/options/comments and no executable statements.
  • 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 In document text (OLE body)

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 281 bytes
SHA-256: 9af026c5321a470026ea2ecb81a9e24f2afbe8a3ebfc4b57922cc9971a436c53
Preview script
First 1,000 lines of the extracted script
Attribute VB_Name = "cUiOqFi"
Attribute VB_Base = "1Normal.ThisDocument"
Attribute VB_GlobalNameSpace = False
Attribute VB_Creatable = False
Attribute VB_PredeclaredId = True
Attribute VB_Exposed = True
Attribute VB_TemplateDerived = True
Attribute VB_Customizable = True