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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 3754117ddffc1b9a…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLSX

343.5 KB First seen: 2022-04-12
MD5: eef05f8835982cee2b4ee418add59361 SHA-1: 4ea5956ce065ed6cda02308b4a2845655de43f61 SHA-256: 3754117ddffc1b9ad646d8f6593629fa0ea33eebffaa49e42eddb713c11a4fe8
160 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is a password-encrypted Office document containing an Equation Editor OLE object. Heuristics indicate this object is an exploit carrier for CVE-2018-0798, a vulnerability in Microsoft Equation Editor. This suggests the document is designed to exploit this vulnerability to achieve arbitrary code execution upon opening.

Heuristics 5

  • 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.
  • 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.