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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 248797247b59bdad…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.06 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-02-11
MD5: bc21a8a958020f8a7f0cd3878792c058 SHA-1: 9c0802b4099b2d8767d5d0cdae6d86bf10e7cbb0 SHA-256: 248797247b59bdad95e07572f1c619afaebba2e58fcda7b00f802aee246ea2c4
110 Risk Score

Malware Insights

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

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor OLE object. Static analysis identified a critical heuristic firing for CVE-2017-11882, indicating exploitation of this vulnerability. The VBA macros are present but contain no executable statements, suggesting the exploit payload is delivered via the OLE object itself. The primary attack vector is the exploitation of the Equation Editor vulnerability.

Heuristics 4

  • 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.
  • 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://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main

Extracted artifacts 2

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
macros.bas
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
bf975a3c9da3f677a1a8aa50ab447cf0b110d77f389a296b9ebf86d778a3c02e
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0233A664/OLe10native 1496 bytes