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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 ee05c4ea463797ea…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

142.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: f481599cb80b79ff1624d8095d60ad37 SHA-1: 5f1f728c01113112866324abb15da0375749d0bf SHA-256: ee05c4ea463797ea4c65e8875bfcf74402644db1abbd120ce65edcf22d915846
120 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File: User Execution: Malicious Macro T1059.005 Command and Scripting Interpreter: Visual Basic

The critical heuristic OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_DEFINEDNAME indicates the presence of an Excel 4.0 Auto_Open macro. The SE_ENABLE_LURE and SE_DOCUSIGN_LURE heuristics, combined with the DOC BODY content, confirm a social engineering attempt to trick the user into enabling macros by impersonating DocuSign. The extracted URLs are likely used to download a secondary payload. No scripts were extracted from this sample, but the XLM macro itself is the primary execution mechanism.

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
  • Document signing service impersonation lure medium SE_DOCUSIGN_LURE
    Document impersonates DocuSign, Adobe Sign, or a similar signing service in a signing-request context

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
xlm_macros.txt
fd395c0d5efe31bc3f4c13f428339dafef8132102e75fdb8cfce92015175af32
xlm-macro oletools.olevba.extract_all_macros (XLM macro listing) 2730 bytes