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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 ea92f35dbd748562…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

145.0 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 72eabee86fc7677bc7b8e8512b5a21d2 SHA-1: a4d99369783caea7601bbc7667b657e08e65b137 SHA-256: ea92f35dbd7485629a192c6373213a2840028da6590c443b91d57561d97ea399
180 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic for Applications T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment

The sample is an Excel 4.0 macro-enabled spreadsheet. Heuristics indicate the presence of an Auto_Open macro that uses dangerous functions and includes environment evasion. The document body text prompts the user to 'Enable Editing' and 'Enable Content', which is a common lure for macro-based attacks. No specific IOCs like URLs or hashes were extracted from the macro itself, but the presence of Auto_Open and the evasion techniques strongly suggest it's designed to download and execute a secondary payload.

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.
  • XLM Auto_Open with dangerous formula APIs critical OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet contains an Auto_Open / Auto_Close entry and dangerous XLM formula APIs that can invoke programs, write files, or transfer control without VBA.
  • XLM Auto_Open environment-evasion HALT gate high OLE_XLM_ENVIRONMENT_EVASION_HALT
    Excel 4.0 macro sheet auto-executes multiple GET.WORKSPACE / GET.WINDOW environment checks and halts execution when the host does not match the expected user environment. This is a common sandbox-evasion pattern in XLM malware and is stronger than a bare XLM macro-sheet indicator.
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
ee556e1fcd98952763b032281739ba01b6f75e7a74f933b557f08b396ffcffea		 xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 177432 bytes

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