Emotet — Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 fd120fa47f43c155…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

150.5 KB Created: 2015-06-05 18:17:20 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: c220264fa9e5322e3832cef074cb388e SHA-1: c2b440b3d3fc6c0513fa0520a0d443ec6a2a74cc SHA-256: fd120fa47f43c155b1185a3495ae54bd80edbf15bbaed465be35e959b31db6de
280 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Emotet · confidence 95%

MITRE ATT&CK
T1059.001 PowerShell T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1204.002 Malicious File T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1059.005 Visual Basic

The file is a malicious Excel spreadsheet containing a Workbook_Open VBA macro. This macro uses Wscript.Shell to create and execute a batch file located at 'c:\programdata\jledshf.bat'. The batch file contains obfuscated commands, including a Base64 encoded string that decodes to a list of URLs, likely for downloading a second-stage payload. The presence of Wscript.Shell, CreateObject, and the Workbook_Open auto-execution strongly indicate Emotet's typical delivery mechanism.

Heuristics 7

  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.EmotetExcel02226-9938630-0
  • Reference to Windows Script Host high SC_STR_WSCRIPT
    Reference to Windows Script Host
  • Workbook_Open macro high OLE_VBA_WBOPEN
    Workbook_Open macro
  • CreateObject call high OLE_VBA_CREATEOBJ
    CreateObject call
  • VBA p-code auto-exec with execution tokens high OLE_VBA_PCODE_AUTOEXEC_EXEC
    Compiled VBA/cache stream contains an auto-execution token together with shell/download/object-execution tokens. This catches p-code-only or source-extraction-failure macro documents where visible source is unavailable.
  • Suspicious extracted artifact high EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE
    One or more files extracted from inside this sample matched static suspicious-content checks such as script obfuscation, encoded payload blobs, packed data, or execution/download terms.
  • VBA macros detected medium OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains VBA macro code

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
006c4f4d54d1c9bb906763adb0bd849cdbbe9d88f3fa78ad2d18ef6987f96c37
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 8906 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved macro source contains an auto-exec entry point and execution/download terms.