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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 09c3a5ad1cdbeece…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

707.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel
MD5: e9e96fce06d3be19db17ffc4529a9bc6 SHA-1: 73f46cff6b00469ea1f2fb6aadb4181b060c8055 SHA-256: 09c3a5ad1cdbeecea965d643129045762a3bc433e0b12f6cdb56cf025d5ea608
70 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.005 Visual Basic

The critical heuristic firing indicates exploitation of CVE-2017-0199, which is used to download and execute a remote loader. The embedded URL 'https://a8s.app/vt9zwj' is likely the source of the secondary payload. Although VBA macros were present, they contained no executable statements, suggesting the exploit is directly leveraged by the OLE structure.

Heuristics 3

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 https://a8s.app/vt9zwj

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes