Malicious RTF / .DOC — malware analysis report

Static analysis result for SHA-256 3a208ad16edc361b…

MALICIOUS

RTF / .DOC

21.7 KB
MD5: 9aacbca620c57b2939593c0e08fb612d SHA-1: 5fd0f773576c08ba054631a54a743c5b542a1ab3 SHA-256: 3a208ad16edc361b356c4ebfaa321bcd5263e3261a54f4a73906ee74205feb29
180 Risk Score

Malware Insights

MITRE ATT&CK
T1203 Exploitation for Client Execution T1059.001 PowerShell

The RTF file contains embedded OLE objects and specifically triggers the Equation Editor vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882). The ".objupdate" directive forces OLE activation, leading to the execution of the embedded object. The decoded object's class is identified as 'eQuAtion.3', which is a strong indicator of this specific exploit. No document body text or scripts were extracted, but the heuristics clearly point to exploitation of CVE-2017-11882 for arbitrary code execution.

Heuristics 5

  • Equation Editor activation — CVE-2017-11882 related high CVE related CVE_2017_11882_ACTIVATION_RELATED
    RTF decodes to an Equation.3 ProgID and requests OLE activation with \objemb plus \objupdate. This reaches the legacy Equation Editor attack surface used by CVE-2017-11882/CVE-2018-0802 documents, but the malformed MTEF/native payload needed for stronger attribution was not recovered.
  • Split hex Equation Editor ProgID + OLE object critical RTF_EQUATION_EDITOR
    RTF embeds the Equation.3 ProgID as hex bytes near OLE object activation and splits the byte stream with whitespace or an ignorable RTF group. This is an Equation Editor OLE activation surface commonly used by CVE-2017-11882 / CVE-2018-0802 exploit documents.
  • \objupdate forces OLE activation high RTF_OBJUPDATE
    RTF contains \objupdate — forces automatic OLE object instantiation when the document is opened, bypassing user interaction. Almost exclusively seen in Equation Editor exploit documents.
  • OLE object data medium RTF_OBJDATA
    RTF contains 2 \objdata section(s) — embedded OLE objects
  • Embedded OLE object medium RTF_OBJEMB
    RTF contains \objemb — embedded OLE object

Extracted artifacts 1

Files carved from inside the sample during analysis.

FilenameKindSourceSize
objdata_00_off00001bd6.bin
0ed879e538d620a686b1c5cae47d9984067b638638f7241fa46f5962e14fc28d		 rtf-objdata-decoded RTF \objdata at offset 0x1BD6 1968 bytes

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