Retour 
Summary
In October 2023, Netskope analyzed a malicious Word document and the malware it contained, dubbed “Menorah.” The malware was attributed to an advanced persistent threat group APT34, and was reported to be distributed via spear-phishing. The malicious Office file uses dispersed and obfuscated VBA code to evade detection.
The advanced persistent threat group targets users of outdated versions of Microsoft Office, since it does not attempt to bypass the mark of the web security check. Malicious Word documents still rank among the top of malware file types based on the latest Netskope Threat Labs threat stats, and in June 2023, we observed that Emotet malware still used macros to download and execute their payloads.
Analysis
Initially, opening the file will show a blank document with an instruction to enable macros. When the user clicks “Enable Content,” the auto-trigger routine in the code will execute. Once the main function is called, the code is deobfuscated and executed through additional VBA functions inside the document.
To help bypass AV and static-based detections, the VBA project is password protected and macros are obfuscated using the Chr( ) VBA function. The payload, when deobfuscated, is in base64 format, as depicted below.
A couple of lengthy strings are stored inside the text field of the userform. These strings are decoded by the macro code and concatenated with other strings scattered on the code to form XSL strings. The XSL strings contain the VBScript code and XSL execution is performed using the TransformNode method of the DOMDocument COM object. The screenshot below shows the VBA macro that performs the XSL script execution.
Once the VBScript is executed, a hardcoded PE file is dropped named “Menorah.exe”. Using the static analysis tool Detect It Easy, we can see that the dropped file is a DotNET executable.
Aside from dropping an executable, the VBScript will also create a scheduled task to attain persistent execution of the malware on the target machine. The scheduled task is named “OneDriveStandaloneUpdater”.
After the backdoor is launched through a scheduled task, it establishes communication with the C2 server through HTTP. Periodic HTTP POST requests are sent to the C2 server in a fixed 32-second interval with encapsulated data. The data contains fingerprint information of the compromised machine for identification. In the response, the attackers send commands to the infected host. The format of the fingerprint sent to server can be found below, where data is base64 encoded and XORed with “Q&4g”:
d@MD5@MachineName|Username
The following screenshots show the HTTP communication and fingerprint information.
The C2 server is identified as http[:]//tecforsc-001-site1[.]gtempurl[.]com/ads.asp and is inactive at the time of analysis. Based on reversing the backdoor, it is expected to receive HTTP response from C2. As the traffic shown in ANY.RUN for this sample, the response Yh9QBTUeUFd/XF0XERd0LGJoQy4WawI/GUJEBTx0QgNiaFcEYkpOAxZwQCorbFc+YxdfKzxwAD0CZ0I+KGQHBhYfXAUGTVMrY2BHBRAbCSc= Is decoded to 39dbd8d0.zip@1@K3NwIGM6XHdpbmRvd3Ncc3lzdGVtMzJcY21kLmV4ZSAvYyB3aG9hbWkgL2FsbA==@, which reveals the command ID and action.
The action K3Nw… is decoded as +sp c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c whoami /all