Malicious RTF — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 003c4e0689d365f3…

MALICIOUS

RTF

13.6 KB First seen: 2023-03-07
MD5: a7817f08646dfa194d48b8668cbf7899 SHA-1: cbc53a5fc545c921692d9ef7dff06a8f450a1998 SHA-256: 003c4e0689d365f3b424498a5ce34b2c622555eb52c3f04f36f163920971c542
200 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1204.002 Malicious File

The RTF document contains OLE object data and triggers heuristics related to Equation Editor exploitation, specifically CVE-2017-11882. The presence of \objdata and \objupdate directives strongly suggests the automatic activation and execution of embedded malicious content. This indicates a likely attack pattern involving a user opening the RTF file, which then exploits the Equation Editor vulnerability to run a payload.

Heuristics 5

  • Equation Editor activation — CVE-2017-11882 related high CVE related CVE_2017_11882_ACTIVATION_RELATED
    RTF decodes to an Equation.3 ProgID and requests OLE activation with \objemb plus \objupdate. This reaches the legacy Equation Editor attack surface used by CVE-2017-11882/CVE-2018-0802 documents, but the malformed MTEF/native payload needed for stronger attribution was not recovered.
  • Split hex Equation Editor ProgID + OLE object critical RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    RTF embeds the Equation.3 ProgID as hex bytes near OLE object activation and splits the byte stream with whitespace or an ignorable RTF group. This is an Equation Editor OLE activation surface commonly used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 exploit documents.
  • Automatically linked OLE object high RTF_OBJAUTLINK
    RTF contains \objautlink — an automatically linked OLE object surface that can be updated or activated when Word opens the document.
  • \objupdate forces OLE activation high RTF_OBJUPDATE
    RTF contains \objupdate — forces automatic OLE object instantiation when the document is opened, bypassing user interaction. Almost exclusively seen in Equation Editor exploit documents.
  • OLE object data medium RTF_OBJDATA
    RTF contains 1 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off000014be.bin
3093cdbdb14e123eec827cfcc5a7f992e8a74e743c1aff6b3e2fabf877e8d709		 rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x14BE 1841 bytes

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