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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 0a28b42d86dcb53b…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.04 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-10-05
MD5: cf45025f4545d02a57a155e186be6870 SHA-1: 28c2bb02a9b9d7b62190c39ddcf4040daff8a78f SHA-256: 0a28b42d86dcb53bd70ec3b328a8f40d8e052da8612136a40fec429bdf5434ac
70 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204.002 Malicious File T1059.005 Visual Basic

The sample is an Excel file that exploits CVE-2017-0199 via an OLE2Link object to download a remote file. The embedded URL points to a .dOC file, suggesting a document-based exploit chain. No VBA code was found to be executable, but the critical heuristic firing indicates the exploit mechanism is present. The primary IOC is the URL used for the secondary payload download.

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 http://23.95.106.3/250/4/ioi0oi0ioiioiOI0IOIO0IOi0ioi0oi0oi0io00iooi00000%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%2300ioi0oi0o0oooOIOI0OIOI0OIoi0%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%23%2300000.dOC

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