Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 edefd18d0580d8d2…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

142.1 KB Created: 2022-01-19 09:31:16 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 81f0a7a1ad8bf108c2648af767e77fcd SHA-1: 9575d97617b4d5b9c22f5d2a0fbfbd3de1ad3de4 SHA-256: edefd18d0580d8d25297bcddc843c3478c20f650b124224460ca9ae267529878
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

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

The critical heuristics indicate the presence of Excel 4.0 macros with an Auto_Open defined name, a known technique for Emotet. ClamAV also specifically detected this as 'Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0'. The macro sheet contains references to sheet names like 'Blood Pressure Data' and 'Blood Pressure Chart', suggesting a lure document. The Auto_Open macro is designed to execute automatically when the workbook is opened, likely to download and execute a secondary payload.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel01220-9936774-0
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
592af8991900f2f7058dc7ea90a33320ae293c7e541db4222a7b7f9c04f59d96
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 8469 bytes