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Once an end user opens.Excel 4.0 (XL4) macros are becoming increasingly popular for attackers, as security vendors struggle to play catchup and detect them properly. Before you go enable macros in your worksheets, it's important to understand how dangerous they can possibly be.CTAs utilize social engineering to trick end users into opening malicious Microsoft Word or Excel attachments included in Malspam emails. Enable macros for individual workbooks Macro security in Excel Enable Macros In Excel 2016 For Mac. This tutorial covers different ways to enable macros in Excel and explains potential risks associated with that.

Intercepting these samples has provided valuable data to build statistics, identify trends, find outliers, and track campaigns. The Lastline Threat Research Group has observed thousands of samples leveraging this technique, and has been monitoring and tracking trends for the last 5+ months. If you do not expect a document to contain a macro, it is safer to click Disable Macros in case the macro is a. You will need to click Enable Macros, or Calc will not allow any macros to be run inside the document. As this is a 30-year-old feature that has only been discovered and exploited en mass by attackers in the last year, many security vendors do not currently have detection mechanisms in place to trigger on these samples, and building reliable signatures for this type of attack is not a small task.Options > LibreOffice > Security > Macro Security, Calc will display the warning shown in Figure 13 or the one shown in Figure 14. For many organizations, blacklisting isnвЂ™t a viable solution, and any signatures to flag these samples must be precise enough not to trigger on files that leverage this feature legitimately.

As previously mentioned, these techniques appear to surface in waves, with each new wave introducing new techniques, building on the previous wave or cluster. The techniques employed by these attackers include ways to evade automated sandbox analysis and signature-based detection, as well as hands-on analysis performed by malware analysts and reverse engineers. As XL4 macros represent somewhat вЂњuncharted territory,вЂќ malware authors and security researchers are making new discoveries daily, pushing the boundaries of this technique and identifying ways to evade detection and obfuscate their code.

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The size of these clusters suggest that these samples are being generated with some sort of toolkit or document generator, as these samples resemble one another too closely to not be related. Each of these waves appeared to build on its predecessor, extending its functionality by introducing new techniques on top of what already was being used. We found that roughly every 1-2 weeks, a new wave of samples emerged, each more evasive and sophisticated than the last. Executive SummaryAre you looking for an Excel Crash Course Get Free Excel Training for a career in corporate finance and investment banking from the Corporate Finance.Through clustering thousands of samples and performing in-depth code-level analysis of each cluster, we were able to visualize and witness the evolution of this threat. In this blog post, we describe each wave and cluster in detail, by breaking down every new technique discovered, and explaining why each is significant, effective, or ineffective.

This technique does not rely on a bug, it is not an exploit, but it simply abuses legitimate Excel functionality. Macros are also robust, and provide various functions that can be leveraged to evade analysis, such as obfuscating the final payload, modifying the control flow, or detecting automated sandbox analysis through specific host environmental checks.This technique will likely remain relevant, and join its successor (i.e., VBA macros) as a widely used technique to weaponize document files. These macros are very straightforward and easy to create, thus easy to modify to bypass signature-based detection. The ProblemSecurity vendors are having difficulty detecting this threat, likely due to not having solutions in place to properly assess and parse the format and structure of how these macros are stored in Excel documents. For this reason, malware authors now have another reliable method for initial access, as these malicious documents are being successfully delivered via email attachments.

These stage-1 spreadsheet samples are in turn delivering a variety of commodity malware families, such as Danabot, ZLoader, Trickbot, Gozi, and Agent Tesla. This additional functionality typically consists of more sophisticated obfuscation or evasion routines. The bulk of these samples appear to be created with the same toolkit or document generator, as each wave builds on the previous, adding new functionality with each iteration. We were able to cluster and classify these samples into clear waves or trends. ContributionThe Threat Research Group at Lastline has clustered and analyzed thousands of XL4 samples, as we have been tracking and monitoring this threat for over five months. As this is somewhat uncharted territory, malware authors and researchers are still exploring the depths of possibilities and capabilities of weaponizing this attack technique.

The techniques introduced in this cluster will be leveraged and built upon by almost all the waves that followed. These samples all contain a hidden macro sheet that holds the payload, and also an image (see Figure 2) that is used to social engineer the user into enabling the macro code. Evolution Breakdown Cluster 1: ~2020.02.14This set of samples is the first significant wave of weaponized XL4 documents we observed. We will elaborate on each cluster in greater detail in the following sections.Figure 1: Evolution of Excel 4.0 macros weaponization. Each block represents a significant wave or cluster that exhibited new behavior and functionality that we had not yet observed at scale.

This function will provide information about the environment that the Excel spreadsheet is being viewed in. Additional sandbox evasions commence, this time using the GET.WORKSPACE function (see Figure 6). Figure 5: MessageBox that requires user interaction.2. If вЂњOKвЂќ is clicked in the message box, the next check in the evasion routine is performed, otherwise the macro will exit.Figure 4: First check in evasion routine. A sandbox check is performed by requiring user interaction with a message box (Figures 4 and 5). Figure 3: Payload of the hidden macrosheet.

Figure 8: Hexdump of DCONN record / Web Query.Figure 10: Name Manager showing destination cells.A small loop is then created between two cells that check whether the payload was downloaded successfully (Figure 11). These web queries are stored in the DCONN (data connection) record type. This is performed through checking for the string вЂWindowsвЂ™ being present in the return value of the call to GET.WORKSPACE: Figure 7: Evasion routine вЂ“ Check for Windows environment.An additional payload вЂ“ a cell formula вЂ“ is downloaded via a web query (Figures 8 and 9). An additional check for the victimвЂ™s OS commences (Figure 7). Figure 6: Evasion routine вЂ“ Mouse and audio capabilities.3. The malware exits if either of these two conditions are not met.

Figure 11: Checking for successful download Cluster 2: ~2020.02. This is because at the end of the downloaded cell formula payload, the malware calls =CLOSE().

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