Malicious RTF / .DOC — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 026bad164ceffebf…

MALICIOUS

RTF / .DOC

26.8 KB
MD5: 5202bda491b09660698175bc30c10765 SHA-1: 66876403c973efad007536375857c72e0265df3a SHA-256: 026bad164ceffebf05e97f795e6065c0c1a7e49781945ec3e9eafaeedb4d0624
180 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment

The RTF document contains critical heuristics indicating the exploitation of CVE-2017-11882 through an embedded Equation Editor object. This exploit allows for arbitrary code execution, likely to download and run a secondary payload. The presence of OLE object data and the specific ProgID 'eQuATion.3' are key indicators of this attack vector.

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.
  • \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 2 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects
  • Embedded OLE object medium RTF_OBJEMB
    RTF contains \objemb — embedded OLE object

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off00001dba.bin
822bf3c809dff72e3b8241640e7e229418081901ac910a422215f65dde8322aa
rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x1DBA 1986 bytes