analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents

analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents is a skill for Claude Code from mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills. It costs 90 tokens per session (3,088 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for examining VBA macros, which are small programs embedded in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, to trace what malicious documents do.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate phishing attachments, extract and decode macro code, identify download addresses and execution methods, and check for related threats such as DDE or remote template injection.
Why use it?
It helps reveal how a suspicious Office file downloads malware, runs code, stays on a computer, or tries to avoid detection without opening it in Microsoft Office.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the cybersecurity-skills plugin — 56 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate phishing attachments, extract and decode macro code, identify download addresses and execution methods, and check for related threats such as DDE or remote template injection.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents
About the project

Anthropic Cybersecurity Skills is a library of structured cybersecurity procedures for AI agents, covering security domains and mappings to established security frameworks. It is for authorized security analysis, penetration testing, incident response, research, defense, and education across compatible AI platforms. The catalogue entries package parts of this library as agent skills, instructions, or a plugin.

mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills · 32,631 stars · on GitHub · mahipal.engineer

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills --skill analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cybersecurity-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 56 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,088 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Snyk pass 7 Sept 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00090 $0.03088
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.01544
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00618
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00309

Measured 12d ago against content hash f63202e005d9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/agent.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

7 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents/SKILL.md · 346 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 346 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Analyzing Macro Malware in Office Documents

When to Use

  • A suspicious Office document (.doc, .docm, .xls, .xlsm, .ppt) has been flagged by email security
  • Investigating phishing campaigns that deliver weaponized Office documents
  • Extracting VBA macro code to identify the payload download URL and execution method
  • Analyzing obfuscated VBA code to understand the full attack chain
  • Determining if a document uses DDE, ActiveX, or remote template injection instead of macros

Do not use for analyzing non-macro Office threats (DDE, remote template injection); while this skill covers detection of these, specialized analysis may be needed.

Prerequisites

  • Python 3.8+ with oletools installed (pip install oletools)
  • oledump.py from Didier Stevens (https://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/oledump-py/)
  • Isolated analysis VM without Microsoft Office installed (prevents accidental execution)
  • XLMDeobfuscator for Excel 4.0 macro analysis (pip install xlmdeobfuscator)
  • LibreOffice for safe document rendering (does not execute VBA macros by default)

Workflow

Step 1: Initial Document Triage

Determine if the document contains macros or other active content:

# Quick triage with olevba
olevba suspect.docm

# Check for OLE streams and macros
oleid suspect.docm

# Output indicators:
# VBA Macros:        True/False
# XLM Macros:        True/False
# External Relationships: True/False (remote template)
# ObjectPool:        True/False (embedded objects)
# Flash:             True/False (SWF objects)

# Comprehensive OLE analysis
oledump.py suspect.docm

# List all OLE streams with macro indicators
# Streams marked with 'M' contain VBA macros
# Streams marked with 'm' contain macro attributes

Step 2: Extract and Analyze VBA Code

Pull out the complete VBA macro source:

# Extract VBA with full deobfuscation
olevba --decode --deobf suspect.docm

# Extract just the VBA source code
olevba --code suspect.docm > extracted_vba.txt

# Detailed extraction with oledump
oledump.py -s 8 -v suspect.docm  # Stream 8 (adjust based on stream listing)

# Extract all macro streams
oledump.py -p plugin_vba_dco suspect.docm

Read the full file on GitHub · 346 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 346 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A f63202e005d9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents is a skill published in the GitHub repository mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills (32,631 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 3,088 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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analyzing-macro-malware-in-office-documents

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Analyzes malicious VBA macros embedded in Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) to identify download cradles, payload execution, persistence mechanisms, and anti-analysis techniques. Uses olevba, oledump, and VBA deobfuscation to extract the attack chain. Activates for requests involving Office macro…

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