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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 23fd58ecdaaf9815…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.43 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-12-06
MD5: 854ca615d81708acf1645c6192942548 SHA-1: 0225c93d22303275f0f25120910964628b3b7c8b SHA-256: 23fd58ecdaaf98158df181b6cf71a8fe2b07f15ef1b31c6073b747c010ecb37f
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor object, which is known to be vulnerable to CVE-2017-11882. This vulnerability allows for the execution of arbitrary code when the object is processed. No VBA macros were found to be executable, but the presence of the vulnerable OLE object is sufficient for exploitation. The file's purpose is to exploit this vulnerability to achieve code execution.

Heuristics 3

  • Equation Editor Ole10Native payload — CVE-2017-11882 critical CVE likely CVE_2017_11882_EQUATION_OLE10NATIVE
    An embedded Microsoft Equation 3.0 object (CLSID 0002CE02-0000-0000-C000-000000000046) carries an Ole10Native packager stream instead of the normal Equation Native/MTEF data. This is the weaponized Equation Editor RCE delivery shape used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 maldocs. The payload (font-record overflow + shellcode) is frequently encrypted and the stream name case-scrambled to evade scanners, but an Equation object holding an Ole10Native stream has no benign use.
  • Equation Editor OLE object high CVE related OLE_EQUATION_EDITOR
    Contains Equation Editor object — related to CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 exploitation, but CLSID presence alone is not the malformed MTEF exploit primitive.
  • 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.

Extracted artifacts 2

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
1d3b71b8c6234aace88f31f6e674b07383e015a2e68993dcd4fc2526aa470fe5
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 2412 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
144bf4f6c1e3bcfa875a15a3f6b9ef79ae2bb17b95119cf550c3fc9da38aa80d
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD00E63900/Ole10Native 1636 bytes