Formbook — Office (OLE) / .XLSX malware analysis

Static analysis result for SHA-256 0f7b3fd7290ce73c…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

192.1 KB First seen: 2022-04-25
MD5: a02816b01a64559afbfbeefbb482ab30 SHA-1: 674582f3f7669e3c1ccf0d6ef2adee388db1d31e SHA-256: 0f7b3fd7290ce73c2e361030cff95f940eceb90ea81a16c7b3a5a6f4aa5c351f
240 Risk Score

Malware Insights

Formbook · confidence 95%

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

The sample is a password-encrypted Office XLSX file identified by ClamAV as Doc.Downloader.Formbook. It contains an embedded Equation Editor OLE object, a common carrier for exploits. The encryption and malformed structure suggest an attempt to evade static analysis, while the embedded OLE object points to exploitation for client execution. The presence of Formbook heuristics indicates a downloader family.

Heuristics 6

  • Equation Editor OLE object high CVE related OLE_EQUATION_EDITOR
    Default-encrypted OOXML embedded OLE object xl/embeddings/oleObject1.bin contains the Equation Editor CLSID, the legacy component exploited by CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0802, and CVE-2018-0798.
  • Encrypted Office package with CFB FAT corruption critical OLE_ENCRYPTED_AND_MALFORMED
    Encrypted-package shape co-occurs with FAT-chain corruption — the documented combined evasion form.
  • ClamAV: Doc.Downloader.Formbook-bc97c1e0c33c3c93-9951465-0 critical CLAMAV_DETECTION
    ClamAV detected this file as malware: Doc.Downloader.Formbook-bc97c1e0c33c3c93-9951465-0
  • Default-encrypted OOXML exploit carrier layout high OOXML_ENCRYPTED_EXPLOIT_CARRIER_SHAPE
    Default-password encrypted OOXML package contains embedded OLE object parts and additional activation/decoy parts. This layout is common in malicious Excel exploit delivery and requires inspecting the decrypted package.
  • Office document is password-encrypted medium OFFICE_ENCRYPTED_PACKAGE
    OLE container holds MS-OFFCRYPTO encrypted package (Standard Encryption (Office 2007, AES)).
  • Office OOXML encrypted with default VelvetSweatshop password medium OFFICE_DEFAULT_PASSWORD_ENCRYPTED_OOXML
    OLE EncryptedPackage decrypts with Excel's built-in VelvetSweatshop password. Office opens this transparently, and malware uses it to hide OOXML exploit parts from scanners that only inspect the outer OLE container.