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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 ecf7e3e66bb3d93b…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

367.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 785116d12c51ca3ce556fb7654836bf1 SHA-1: ad328e0c469f2827ff5bee7a50367ff7f54f0139 SHA-256: ecf7e3e66bb3d93b9599733298203157e4c7b71f71627d313c6fd1ac19e767a0
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) macro-enabled spreadsheet. It contains an Auto_Open defined name, indicating that macros will execute automatically upon opening. The presence of an 'enable lure' heuristic suggests the document prompts the user to enable macros. The embedded URLs are likely used to download a second-stage payload. No scripts were extracted, but the XLM macros are sufficient to infer malicious intent.

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