Skip to main content

Oletools

🕵️‍♂️ How to Analyze .docx and .xlsm Files with oletools

🔧 0. Install oletools (if not already)

pip install oletools

 

📄 Analyzing .docx Files (OpenXML Word Documents)

1. Run olevba on the .docx file

olevba file.docx

    🔸 .docx files normally do not contain macros, so this often returns "no VBA macros found".

2. Unzip the .docx to check for embedded objects

unzip file.docx -d extracted/

3. Look for embedded OLE objects

Check inside:

extracted/word/embeddings/oleObject1.bin

If present, these may contain embedded files (some of them malicious).
4. Analyze embedded OLE objects

olevba extracted/word/embeddings/oleObject1.bin

    🧠 Look for VBA code, suspicious keywords, and auto-execution triggers.

5. Use oleid for high-level metadata

oleid file.docx

Helps you quickly see:

    Is the file encrypted?

    Are macros present?

    External relationships?

    Suspicious flags?

 

 


Tools in oletools

Tools to analyze malicious documents

  • oleid: analyzes OLE files to detect specific characteristics usually found in malicious files.
  • olevba: extracts and analyzes VBA macro source code from MS Office documents (OLE and Open XML).
  • MacroRaptor: detects malicious VBA Macros. (mraptor -m <file> for strings)
  • msodde: detects and extracts DDE/DDEAUTO links from MS Office documents, RTF and CSV.
  • pyxswf: detects, extracts, and analyzes Flash objects (SWF) that may be embedded in files such as MS Office documents and RTF, which is especially useful for malware analysis.
  • oleobj: extracts embedded objects from OLE files.
  • rtfobj: extracts embedded objects from RTF files.

Tools to analyze the structure of OLE files

  • olebrowse: a simple GUI to browse OLE files (e.g. MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents), allowing you to view and extract individual data streams.
  • olemeta: extracts all standard properties (metadata) from OLE files.
  • oletimes: extracts creation and modification timestamps of all streams and storages.
  • oledir: displays all the directory entries of an OLE file, including free and orphaned entries.
  • olemap: displays a map of all the sectors in an OLE file.

 

🕵️‍♂️

Back to top