Tools to extract VBA Macro source code from MS Office Documents

This article presents several tools that can be used to extract VBA Macros source code from MS Office Documents, for malware analysis and forensics. It also provides an overview of how VBA Macros are stored. ...

February 7, 2017 · Philippe Lagadec

VBA Macro analysis: Beware of the Shift Key!

Many malware analysts like to use the VB Editor in MS Word or Excel to analyze malicious macros, because it provides a nice debugging environment. It is a convenient solution to run VBA code in its native context, in order to unmask heavily obfuscated macros. ...

December 5, 2016 · Philippe Lagadec

Using VBA Emulation to Analyze Obfuscated Macros

ViperMonkey is an experimental toolkit that I have been developing since early 2015, to parse VBA macros and emulate their execution. This articles shows how it can be used to analyze obfuscated macros and extract hidden strings/IOCs. ...

September 28, 2016 · Philippe Lagadec

Malware Search

This custom Google search engine helps you find malware samples containing specific strings, filenames, hashes or other IOCs. It uses the data indexed by several websites including malwr.com, hybrid-analysis.com, virustotal.com and virusshare.com. For example, search "VB_Nam" to find malicious VBA macros, or "\objdata" to find RTF files with OLE Package objects. ...

August 17, 2016 · Philippe Lagadec

How to detect most malicious macros without an antivirus

mraptor is a simple tool designed to detect malicious VBA macros in MS Office files, based on characteristics of the VBA code. This article explains how it works, and how it can be used in practice. ...

June 29, 2016 · Philippe Lagadec

Anti-Analysis Tricks in Weaponized RTF

This article describes several anti-analysis tricks found in recent malicious RTF documents, and how I improved rtfobj to handle them. ...

April 12, 2016 · Philippe Lagadec

8KB of malware crammed into a single command line in a macro

A few days ago, @Bry_Campbell told me about a strange sample with a malicious macro, that could not be fully analyzed with online sandboxes and the usual tools. ...

February 22, 2016 · Philippe Lagadec

How to grill Malicious Macros - SSTIC15

Since 2014, malicious macros are coming back. And their success in recent campaigns demonstrates that it is still an effective way to deliver malware, sixteen years after Melissa. This is a presentation that I gave to the SSTIC symposium in June 2015, translated to English. It explains what malicious macros can do, how their code can be obfuscated, and some of the anti-analysis tricks observed in recent cases. Then it shows several tools that can be used to analyze macros, including oledump and olevba. ...

February 1, 2016 · Philippe Lagadec