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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 2e8a196bde53762b…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

99.5 KB First seen: 2022-09-02
MD5: fa8b0dc85baa1f4d726d1c985a5d9e94 SHA-1: b0ec58778907a470c557b678071c061a3e73aedd SHA-256: 2e8a196bde53762b6501abb79388880cc14885282ab3a01c3ecdd2e2e876cb83
220 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The file is an encrypted Office document containing an Equation Editor OLE object. Heuristics indicate it exploits CVE-2018-0798, a vulnerability in Equation Editor, likely to execute a secondary payload. The document's encrypted nature and the specific exploit carrier point to a malicious intent to compromise the user's system.

Heuristics 6

  • Equation Editor OLE object high CVE related OLE_EQUATION_EDITOR
    Default-encrypted OOXML embedded OLE object xl/embeddings/oleObject1.bin contains the Equation Editor CLSID, the legacy component exploited by CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0802, and CVE-2018-0798.
  • CVE-2018-0798 — anomalous Equation Editor native stream high CVE likely CVE_2018_0798_EQUATION_NATIVE_ANOMALY
    Default-encrypted OOXML contains embedded Equation Editor data with anomalous native stream bytes consistent with a CVE-2018-0798-style exploit. This is treated as likely CVE evidence because the Equation object is malformed and payload-like.
  • Encrypted Office package with CFB FAT corruption critical OLE_ENCRYPTED_AND_MALFORMED
    Encrypted-package shape co-occurs with FAT-chain corruption — the documented combined evasion form.
  • Default-encrypted OOXML exploit carrier layout high OOXML_ENCRYPTED_EXPLOIT_CARRIER_SHAPE
    Default-password encrypted OOXML package contains embedded OLE object parts and additional activation/decoy parts. This layout is common in malicious Excel exploit delivery and requires inspecting the decrypted package.
  • Office document is password-encrypted medium OFFICE_ENCRYPTED_PACKAGE
    OLE container holds MS-OFFCRYPTO encrypted package (Standard Encryption (Office 2007, AES)).
  • Office OOXML encrypted with default VelvetSweatshop password medium OFFICE_DEFAULT_PASSWORD_ENCRYPTED_OOXML
    OLE EncryptedPackage decrypts with Excel's built-in VelvetSweatshop password. Office opens this transparently, and malware uses it to hide OOXML exploit parts from scanners that only inspect the outer OLE container.

Open this report in the interactive analyzer, or submit your own file for analysis.