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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 388598f0dfc63bde…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

425.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-01-24
MD5: 3a6db030d1267b0cbdb5429c2b5b91a4 SHA-1: ba06e8dba94a79c65b8eb6cbee9b5a88562fcdeb SHA-256: 388598f0dfc63bdee13569fcceef3bb60c0d272b6b3f6b8fc4be4bd10c90f9fa
110 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor OLE object. Static analysis identified a critical heuristic firing for CVE_2017_11882_EQUATION_OLE10NATIVE, indicating exploitation of this known vulnerability. The VBA macros are present but contain no executable statements, suggesting the exploit payload is delivered via the OLE object itself.

Heuristics 4

  • 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.
  • Embedded URL info EMBEDDED_URL
    One or more URLs were extracted from the document. The URL itself is not a detection — see the per-URL labels for which channel (macro, JS, link annotation, document body, ...) reached each URL.
    URL http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/main

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
f87d6e3436fa2e0b7c4a3bcd900a399412bb0d900e9df5d2f4cc7074d76cf064
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD0161E04A/OLE10nAtIvE 1589 bytes