Office (OLE) / .XLS malware analysis — malicious · ff84b0d2381b71c2

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

130.5 KB Created: 2018-12-06 20:43:11 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-07-29

MD5: a844ff5a99b9ccba560b0f8273a8f2eb SHA-1: 7c021fbfb21735f5a0fab26af1de0fe5d901829e SHA-256: ff84b0d2381b71c2bfd1575916e663a96ae5120b0d059411411f9224fc1004c0

380 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK

T1059.005 Visual Basic for Applications T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.003 Windows Command Shell T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer

The sample is an Excel file containing VBA macros, specifically a Workbook_Open macro designed to execute code. Heuristics indicate the use of WScript.Shell and a Shell() call, suggesting the download and execution of a secondary payload. The document body explicitly instructs the user to 'Enable content to display this transaction receipt', a common lure for macro-based malware.

Heuristics 9

Shell() call in VBA critical OLE_VBA_SHELL

Shell() call in VBA
WScript.Shell usage critical OLE_VBA_WSCRIPT

WScript.Shell usage
VBA downloads and writes a file to disk critical OLE_VBA_HTTP_DROP_EXEC

VBA reads an HTTP response body and writes it to disk (ADODB.Stream SaveToFile). Combined with the auto-exec/Shell paths this is a download-drop dropper even when the COM ProgIDs are built dynamically to evade keyword scanning.
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.
VBA macros detected medium OLE_VBA_MACROS

Document contains VBA macro code
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

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

Filename	Kind	Source	Size
`macros.bas` `9d19498d6a31d7d8ac6bdfa1ba31c58f1a70ab77caaa8ec2e8226f05e442a187`	vba-macro	oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source)	24433 bytes

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