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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 168a8f539999c5aa…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

915.0 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2026-03-03
MD5: f9d8154195f7557b910b97bef2df0c81 SHA-1: a5795db2ce82cf09fa67b8551eee6539943e54cf SHA-256: 168a8f539999c5aa8be06a620fdc7d0f9dc44ea28fc436218a1bb9fd04d273be
70 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is an Excel file that exploits CVE-2017-0199, a known vulnerability for remote code execution. It contains a URL that is likely used to download and execute a second-stage payload. Although VBA macros are present, they appear to be empty, suggesting the exploit is directly leveraged by the OLE object rather than through macro execution.

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://000030000730355/1000000000000000000000000.php

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

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