Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 e88ffdfc958c6a41…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

109.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:19:34 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 8e8d7f071bdcb3beee04152a0ded6078 SHA-1: eaf5719caabecbf37df45c949add5db6cd4c01c4 SHA-256: e88ffdfc958c6a419bf9bc21f516a809c7928eb15cabb863ccaa9d61eb1d74bf
142 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The presence of Excel 4.0 macros, specifically the OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN heuristic, indicates a macro-based execution. The OLE_XLM_CELL_ARRAY_URL heuristic and the reconstructed URLs in the DOC BODY section confirm that the macro is designed to download a second-stage payload. ClamAV detection as 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02220-9938626-0' strongly suggests the Emotet family. The script concatenates strings to form URLs, which are then likely used for payload delivery.

Heuristics 4

  • URL reconstructed from XLM cell array (5 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.EmotetExcel02220-9938626-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02220-9938626-0
  • 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 http://arzulens.com/wp-includes/7gySgTg/
    • https://simplinteriors.com/wp-admin/B1e/
    • https://www.swaong.com/wp-admin/k9Db4Vjafnk/
    • http://68bets.site/b/bL2bq71qNY/
    • https://farocf.com/wp-admin/rX9FcCxf0Cf4bj/

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