Malicious Office (OLE) / .XLS — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 e4d8428786a2d4c7…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

367.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: fb3470d2fd7f3d19b782c86df6bf2a44 SHA-1: c9c406b0b73811c5ffb74dd8055272a7a628d52d SHA-256: e4d8428786a2d4c71be575d3d3bd431016f8b2b23cb09843f39f94998059780e
102 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is an Excel 4.0 (XLM) spreadsheet containing an Auto_Open macro, indicating automatic execution upon opening. It also contains an 'enable lure' heuristic, suggesting the document prompts the user to enable macros. The embedded URLs likely serve as download locations for secondary payloads. The presence of XLM macros and the lure technique strongly suggest a macro-based malware delivery mechanism.

Heuristics 4

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — context-specific rules above attribute URLs they actually evaluated; this rule lists URLs that were present in the bytes but were not otherwise tied to a specific finding.
    URL https://mayread.com/aXfFF8qdsV/th.html
    • https://tpcsv.neosj.why3s.tw/XjHoDakG/th.html

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
7758cbebef832a37ce0a327fd7d893202195f03ba9b854edef74b19dbb11678f
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8349 bytes