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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 e9644077e66d0c3a…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

70.0 KB Created: 2018-12-06 20:43:11 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-02-01
MD5: 34cbb5ac678f627ed2053a87da50e163 SHA-1: fa01c68612b2c1e83cecc2caff490a1a305c16da SHA-256: e9644077e66d0c3a6c34486eb4b6db56f83c3bbbd643473b729c10b05dc77e68
422 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic T1059.001 PowerShell T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer T1204.002 Malicious File

The XLS file contains VBA macros, including a Workbook_Open event, which is a common technique for automatic execution upon opening. Critical heuristics indicate the use of WScript.Shell and a Shell() call, combined with a critical heuristic for downloading and executing a file via HTTP, strongly suggesting a downloader or droppper functionality. No specific family could be identified, but the behavior is consistent with a macro-based malware delivery mechanism.

Heuristics 10

  • Shell() call in VBA critical OLE_VBA_SHELL
    Shell() call in VBA
  • WScript.Shell usage critical OLE_VBA_WSCRIPT
    WScript.Shell usage
  • VBA downloads and writes a file to disk critical OLE_VBA_HTTP_DROP_EXEC
    VBA reads an HTTP response body and writes it to disk (ADODB.Stream SaveToFile). Combined with the auto-exec/Shell paths this is a download-drop dropper even when the COM ProgIDs are built dynamically to evade keyword scanning.
  • ClamAV: Xls.Malware.Valyria-10032137-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Xls.Malware.Valyria-10032137-0
  • 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.
  • VBA macros detected medium OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains VBA macro code
  • Suspicious extracted artifact info 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
9f25019b1a390442a39694662504705d7e7057e63588d6828bb3db94e3716324
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 36921 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact contains 110 long base64-like blob(s).