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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 293314640ee6beee…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

1.08 MB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2022-11-30
MD5: 014d135bd4480d8e09d623b7c35ca8e7 SHA-1: ed376569bc1d1730d3f4dd60720f6929e5f98ad6 SHA-256: 293314640ee6beee63f90213044a31ea6b033f468cae6d70f927ed64bca7eacb
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The critical heuristic firing for CVE_2017_11882_EQUATION_OLE10NATIVE indicates the exploitation of a known vulnerability in Microsoft Equation Editor. This is further supported by the OLE_EQUATION_EDITOR heuristic. The VBA macros are present but appear to contain no executable statements, suggesting the primary malicious functionality is within the embedded OLE object.

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
ed8da65f0f0a4cc2a905cfcf1ae916bf05ced375ebeefae9a837c8bf84ad6699
vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 3618 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
f91d7a97ece2d6ff7a44699837b98641f8d332d50925be964f59761432d1f6b8
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD018265B4/OLE10NATIve 1935 bytes