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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 35b1d5c29029492f…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

209.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-07-03
MD5: ab5b563f8685a735b193f253a0d6c370 SHA-1: ae8f78e8efa4a3688b3850153bc046757bc56282 SHA-256: 35b1d5c29029492f9c693eb7eb73a5b8fb1acb04252af27aae234928ac056fdf
108 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 object, which is known to be vulnerable to CVE-2017-11882. This vulnerability allows for arbitrary code execution 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 is therefore assessed as a likely exploit delivery mechanism for this specific CVE.

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
7f506327609c082af1cd37dde23bc2c71a000f7d1ef530b6abb66775040a7673		 vba-macro oletools.olevba.extract_macros (decoded VBA source) 1206 bytes
ole10native_00.bin
371cb81a1ec4192521f3cc563b8cdc2a068ba9cd7faa7db02650a1ea66d962c5		 ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0008ACBA/OLe10NAtIVe 1573 bytes

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