Malicious Office (OLE) / .XLS — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 022ce623f01cacd0…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

284.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: 466528ef3c113a63348293bfa4d42916 SHA-1: 673bf4be50a997060c404380d9bd75fa7a9e92ce SHA-256: 022ce623f01cacd0d95615b545267145e5a96efcce461f3f9eda92e6fa0c91c3
114 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is an Excel file that leverages the OLE2Link vulnerability (CVE-2017-0199) to fetch and execute a remote payload from a crafted URL. The embedded PDF artifact also contains suspicious findings, suggesting a multi-stage attack. No VBA macros were found to be executable, but the presence of an embedded PDF and the exploitation of CVE-2017-0199 indicate a high likelihood of malicious intent.

Heuristics 6

  • OLE2Link / URL Moniker → remote loader — CVE-2017-0199 critical CVE likely CVE_2017_0199
    Document contains an embedded OLE link object whose URL Moniker points to a remote URL. When the host file is opened, Office follows the link, downloads the URL, and processes the response based on its Content-Type (HTA -> mshta.exe, RTF → Word, etc.) — the documented CVE-2017-0199 primitive. The URL extension is not a reliable filter; servers can return different payloads to Office's user agent.
  • Secondary embedded PDF body has suspicious static findings high POLYGLOT_CHILD_PDF_STATIC_TRIAGE
    A valid PDF body was found at a nonzero offset inside another container and its carved contents matched PDF exploit or lure heuristics. This catches polyglots where the top-level magic routes to ZIP/OLE while a PDF reader or downstream parser opens the hidden PDF payload.
  • VBA project contains no executable statements low OLE_VBA_MACROS
    Document contains a VBA project, but extracted modules only contain attributes/options/comments and no executable statements.
  • Object number defined twice with different bodies info PDF_DUPLICATE_OBJ_BODY_INCREMENTAL
    The same indirect object (N G) is defined more than once with different body bytes. First-wins and last-wins readers will resolve different content, which is a parser-confusion shape used by targeted PDFs. Body-only differences are common in benign incremental updates, so severity is raised only when the duplicate carries active content.
  • Suspicious extracted artifact info EXTRACTED_FILE_STATIC_TRIAGE
    One or more files extracted from inside this sample matched static suspicious-content checks such as script obfuscation, encoded payload blobs, packed data, or execution/download terms.
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/
    • http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
    • http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceEvent#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceRef#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/illustrator/1.0/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/t/pg/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/Dimensions#
    • http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/g/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/photoshop/1.0/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/tiff/1.0/
    • http://ns.adobe.com/exif/1.0/
    • http://www.iec.ch

Extracted artifacts 3

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
cc336480f7870e3804d4f9c7efe580b4935515000181b4de8d40398ecfb9d663		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD00B08552/Ole10Native 109311 bytes
Detection
ClamAV: No threats found
Obfuscation or payload: likely
Carved artifact entropy is 7.75, consistent with packed or encrypted content.
polyglot_child_pdf_off0001be00.pdf
3036d3e8dde1c554f8be9828729d72ac5610414ab09bbecdd6a014a6de5c8c9f		 polyglot-child-pdf Secondary PDF body inside ole container at offset 0x1BE00 176640 bytes

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