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

Static analysis result for SHA-256 39265fa62aeadb86…

MALICIOUS

Office (OLE) / .XLS

176.5 KB Created: 2006-09-16 00:00:00 Authoring application: Microsoft Excel First seen: 2023-03-06
MD5: 3ae773454a2a84b3ba666498cd276a35 SHA-1: 31a4f2bbc41b91bd321b69b65136c78286a142c0 SHA-256: 39265fa62aeadb8666d9d3f715df800559ce2470e9fdbd44de85682200e40ecd
108 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.005 Visual Basic

The sample is an Excel file containing an embedded Equation Editor object that exploits CVE-2017-11882. This vulnerability allows for arbitrary code execution when the object is processed. Although the VBA project contains no executable statements, the presence of the vulnerable OLE object is sufficient for exploitation.

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
21e3832798a7f0af824e51c2e23251695694f31b36c3ad6ae414e89bf84776d6
ole-package OLE Ole10Native stream: MBD01D6F145/olE10natIVE 1545 bytes