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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 fa4321f840e0ef9e…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

526.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2021-05-26
MD5: 6fed2abfc4d0758d7b9175c446894702 SHA-1: 07741f1b9c113e08fc9630f7848367c5caaa250a SHA-256: fa4321f840e0ef9e2aac797c82183e7316c88239ca3450b74f6c7c16aa29d2e1
142 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.005 Visual Basic for Applications T1204.002 Malicious File

The presence of an Excel 4.0 macro sheet (XLM) and a heuristic indicating a lure to enable macros strongly suggests malicious intent. The document's content likely aims to trick the user into enabling macros, which would then execute the embedded XLM macro. This macro is likely designed to download and execute a second-stage payload from one of the provided URLs.

Heuristics 5

  • XLM Auto_Open workbook with payload URL or enable-content lure critical OLE_XLM_AUTOOPEN_PAYLOAD_LURE
    Workbook contains an Excel 4.0 macro sheet with Auto_Open / Auto_Close and also exposes a payload URL or enable-content lure in the OLE bytes. This combination is a high-confidence XLM downloader/social-engineering pattern even when formula recovery cannot decode the full macro chain.
  • Excel 4.0 (XLM) macro sheet uses dangerous capability functions high OLE_XLM_DANGEROUS_FN_STATIC
    Workbook contains an Excel 4.0 macro sheet whose formulas reference two or more dangerous capability functions (e.g. CALL into a Win32 API such as URLDownloadToFile, EXEC to launch a process, REGISTER an external DLL procedure, or FWRITE/FOPEN to drop a file) with an Auto_Open / Auto_Close auto-execution name. This is the canonical XLM downloader/dropper shape and is recovered directly from the BIFF records, so it fires even when the full macro chain cannot be deobfuscated.
  • 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 — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL https://digitrac.org/g31Qro72rb4Q/heart.html In document text (OLE body)
    • https://swedish.askochembla.nl/6PNITEcbA/heart.htmlIn document text (OLE body)

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