Malicious RTF / .DOC — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 2e217175ba8bf82f…

MALICIOUS

RTF / .DOC

44.6 KB First seen: 2023-09-04
MD5: f88e3f772848a9d04a8c470d6bbf4570 SHA-1: c2def1fac82bfe8b89645e067dc82e1852e32b5a SHA-256: 2e217175ba8bf82f323f4aae143e8355d9163d9ab308a5eacf56394a3a16c87f
140 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1204 Malicious Link T1204.002 Malicious File T1566 Phishing T1566.001 Spearphishing Attachment T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter

The sample is an RTF document that leverages an Equation Editor vulnerability, indicated by the RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR and RTF_OBJUPDATE heuristics. The document body contains a lure related to financial audits, instructing the user to 'Enable editing', which is a common tactic to bypass macro security. The presence of OLE object data suggests the embedded object is intended to be activated, likely to download and execute a secondary payload.

Heuristics 4

  • Split hex Equation Editor ProgID + OLE object critical RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    RTF embeds the Equation.3 ProgID as hex bytes near OLE object activation and splits the byte stream with whitespace or an ignorable RTF group. This is an Equation Editor OLE activation surface commonly used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 exploit documents.
  • \objupdate forces OLE activation high RTF_OBJUPDATE
    RTF contains \objupdate — forces automatic OLE object instantiation when the document is opened, bypassing user interaction. Almost exclusively seen in Equation Editor exploit documents.
  • OLE object data medium RTF_OBJDATA
    RTF contains 1 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects
  • Macro/content-enable lure medium SE_ENABLE_LURE
    Document instructs the user to enable macros or editing — a common technique used by malware droppers to bypass Office macro security settings

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off00003b7e.bin
d4094471ff8f0c8cdf23f9f65907fb733a9106b8f952b907eab83f820acb8d95
rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x3B7E 1525 bytes